Literate Societies Place Less Value on the Elderly

...older people in traditional societies have a huge significance that would never occur to us in our modern, literate societies, where our sources of information are books and the Internet. In contrast, in traditional societies without writing, older people are the repositories of information. It's their knowledge that spells the difference between survival and death for their whole society in a time of crisis caused by rare events for which only the oldest people alive have had experience. ...

 Bilinguals Perform Better at Non-Verbal Tests

When communicating, bilinguals must successfully manage two conflicting languages; one must be accessed whilst the other is suppressed, in order to avoid involuntary language switching. The cognitive demands of this task are thought to be the origin of the bilingual advantage in executive control. A series of studies have demonstrated that bilinguals outperform their peers on tests of non-linguistic interference. Bilingual children, middle aged adults and older adults consistently record fa...

 Sifting Through Photographs of Our Ancestors to See Evolu...

Find a picture of yourself. Now take a picture of your father and place it on top. Then find a picture of his father, your grandfather. Then place on top of that a picture of your grandfather's father, your great-grandfather. You may not have ever met any of your great-grandfathers. I never met any of mine, but I know that one was a country schoolmaster, one a country doctor, one a forester in British India, and one a lawyer, greedy for cream, who died rock-climbing in old age. Still, even if...

 A Young Professor Plank

There is a story that once, not long after he came to Berlin, Planck forgot which room had been assigned to him for a lecture and stopped at the entrance office of the university to find out. Please tell me, he asked the elderly man in charge, 'In which room does Professor Planck lecture today?' The old man patted him on the shoulder 'Don't go there, young fellow,' he said 'You are much too young to understand the lectures of our learned Professor Planck'.