“Rarely” might be headline exaggeration

“After adjusting for age, sex, race, ethnicity and education, roughly 1 in 100 taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer’s, compared with 1 in 60 people overall.”

There is mention of a study showing that the brain is changed “under sustained navigational demand” in support of this result

The news article

https://theconversation.com/taxi-drivers-rarely-die-of-alzheimers-how-complex-mental-maps-and-spatial-reasoning-protect-your-brain-286650

The paper

https://www.bmj.com/content/387/bmj-2024-082194

Use it or lose it?

Taxi drivers … prior to the introduction of Google Maps …

1 minute ago, iNow said:

Taxi drivers … prior to the introduction of Google Maps …

Good point!

1 hour ago, iNow said:

Taxi drivers … prior to the introduction of Google Maps …

And probably more importantly, GPS. Google maps is a matter of convenience as compared to paper maps, but still requires some navigation skill.

The amount of navving I've done from vague directions, memorized maps, or wilderness treks with a compass, I guess I'm cognitively safe till 100 or so, barring strokes, parasitic infestation, or too much Netflix. What's funny (to my wife, anyway, who is too easily amused) is that I will occasionally lose track of the car in a large parking lot.

When I was in London, I did okay finding places, except for one occasion when the cabin lights failed in the Tube. Sitting in darkness as we rolled along I got nervous and grasped the arm of a fellow next to me. As we approached another stop, I asked, "Is this Cockfosters?"

"No," he answered, rather sternly, "It's mine!"

(Sorry. Been saving that one.)

2 hours ago, TheVat said:

The amount of navving I've done from vague directions, memorized maps, or wilderness treks with a compass, I guess I'm cognitively safe till 100 or so, barring strokes, parasitic infestation, or too much Netflix. What's funny (to my wife, anyway, who is too easily amused) is that I will occasionally lose track of the car in a large parking lot.

When I was in London, I did okay finding places, except for one occasion when the cabin lights failed in the Tube. Sitting in darkness as we rolled along I got nervous and grasped the arm of a fellow next to me. As we approached another stop, I asked, "Is this Cockfosters?"

"No," he answered, rather sternly, "It's mine!"

(Sorry. Been saving that one.)

I had to run that one through AI ...

You obviously had a dirty (or a guilty) mind.He must certainly have said "No,this is mine", meaning his stop.

(I wonder what the Alzheimer's mortality rate would have been for taxi passengers if they had thought to include it in their survey)

Edited yesterday at 02:36 AM1 day by geordief

12 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

Use it or lose it?

I'm in my 89th year and each day I do Wordle and the Daily Codeword. It's not much but I tell myself it helps keep the old grey cells active.

15 minutes ago, OldTony said:

I'm in my 89th year and each day I do Wordle and the Daily Codeword. It's not much but I tell myself it helps keep the old grey cells active.

+1

18 hours ago, iNow said:

Taxi drivers … prior to the introduction of Google Maps …

I think London cabbies still memorize the streets to earn their license. Would be interesting to add that cohort to the mix.

I seem to recall hearing that (in context of declining rates of successful passing scores with modern attempts relative to historical rates)

So good callout

There has been some discussion as to whether taxi drivers keep their wits about them, drive more carefully in general, and are less likely to be involved in road traffic accidents than drivers of private cars.

https://www.helpinginjured.com/blog/ridesharing/do-rules-for-taxis-reduce-accidents/

A study in New York City indicated that taxi and livery cars — such as black cars, for-hire livery services, and limos with fewer than nine passengers — have a 33% lower crash rate than other drivers. Over every 1 million miles driven, there are 4.6 cab crashes, 3.7 livery car crashes, and 6.7 crashes with private cars.

A counter argument is that taxi drivers spend a great deal more time on high-traffic urban roads, so their total annual number of collisions can be higher, and the consequences of a collision can be more serious because cab drivers and their passengers often fail to wear seatbelts on short urban rides. Fatigue caused by long hours of work can also offset the greater driving experience of professional cabbies.

Another study in Japan analysed traffic accident statistics and data recorders fitted to cabs from eight different professional taxi firms across the whole of Japan.

https://hal.science/hal-05424169v1/file/Tu-B1-3_594298_FASTzero25_Final_Paper_Aga.pdf

The conclusions indicate that professional taxi drivers who have held a licence for over 10  years were the least likely to cause an accident. The DR (data recorder) stats suggest that taxi drivers generally drove at safer speeds and braked almost instantly and more effectively within a TTC (time to collision) window when crossing vehicles appeared in their view.

The study concluded that they  were more observant, and more likely to be following defensive and predictive driving protocols.

38 minutes ago, toucana said:

they  were more observant, and more likely to be following defensive and predictive driving protocols.

A finding which is surely regionally specific. Seems contrary to my copious anecdotal experiences with taxi drivers in other countries with more populace urban centers

1 hour ago, iNow said:

A finding which is surely regionally specific. Seems contrary to my copious anecdotal experiences with taxi drivers in other countries with more populace urban centers

The Japanese study involved taxi firms located all over Japan from Fukuoka on Kyushu, to Sapporo in Hokkaido, and also included firms from the capital Tokyo, as well as Takamatsu and Shizuoka on Honshu  - all major islands of the Japanese achipelago with a combined population of some  122.4 million people as of 2026.

The other study cited was in New York City which is a massive conurbation with a population of 8.58 million people,  the largest city in the United States - hardly regionally specific samples or aberrations.

Possibly a selection effect in such statistics. Ordinary drivers, if they have an accident, or several, and/or rack up lots of speeding tickets, don't usually remove themselves from private driving.* Taxi drivers OTOH could be removed from their jobs. Thus leaving a higher proportion remaining of taxi drivers with excellent reaction times and pattern observation and predictive skills. Business models in this regard would be fairly darwinian.

* That would vastly improve driving where I live, if they did. Unfortunately most drivers of lesser skill and judgement are only "culled from the herd" by racking up enough points for license revocation or having insurance cancelled (and even that doesn't stop some of them).

7 hours ago, TheVat said:

Possibly a selection effect in such statistics.

Yes indeed there is much to be gained by reading the statistics in the original British Medical Journal article properly.

The data in the original article is freely available, so amenable to more detailed questioning/analysis.

In my time I have noted a definite skew in the populations of taxi drivers towards men as prepared to the population at large or the population of drivers, or the population of professional drivers.

13 hours ago, toucana said:

hardly regionally specific samples or aberrations

I suspect the broader “be nice” social cultural expectation in Japan plays a far bigger role here, and TBH NYC wasn’t the type of urban center I had in mind. More like Mumbai and Calcutta and Lagos and Bogota or Rio, even Mexico City.

All to say I wouldn’t be as quick as you to so summarily dismiss my broadly valid point based on 2 or 3 counter examples, especially when one of those examples has such a deep history of being respectful toward others and the second example has such a large mass of land / less concentrated population.

Edited 2 hours ago2 hr by iNow

25 minutes ago, iNow said:

I suspect the broader “be nice” social cultural expectation in Japan plays a far bigger role here, and TBH NYC wasn’t the type of urban center I had in mind. More like Mumbai and Calcutta and Lagos and Bogota or Rio, even Mexico City.

All to say I wouldn’t be as quick as you to so summarily dismiss my broadly valid point based on 2 or 3 counter examples, especially when one of those examples has such a deep history of being respectful toward others and the second example has such a large mass of land / less concentrated population.

Did you read the actual study ?

I see that it simply stated that the taxi (and ambulance) drivers it studied were found to be the least likely to contract the condition.

A good and correct report, too often omitted these days.

But as I already noted there is plenty of statistical data to consider.