The connection is believed to be the spatial reasoning involved in routing. No causative link is suggested.
This is triggering me lol. I was a Paramedic for 10 years and 3 of those years were before GPS existed and we had these awful 900 page 5" thick things we had to wield on the fly called Map Books. It was part of our probation period testing and they would time us to pick out the routes reliably within a certain deadline or not graduate from being a probie.
While your partner drove to the call you'd put the book on your lap and flip to the big large grid which would tell you which map your location would be on (page 770), then you'd look up the street in the back appendix to get the coordinates for the specific house (P5, C2) and then find the cross street on another page (P5, C3), go to the grid and find the closest appropriate hospital for the purpose of the call (different ERs have different functions- for gunshots go to Highland, for amputations go to CalPac Davies, for heart attacks go to UCSF, etc) (page 815), the street location for that (A6, C4) and then make your route while flipping back and forth between all the pages while simultaneously telling your partner where to turn as you go.
When I went to a better ran company, dispatch would give us map page and grid coordinates over the radio when we got the call.
Within a few months you learn most of the neighborhoods and routes, and road hazards and preferences- for example if going to UCSF from the Peninsula take O'Shaughnessy because there's no traffic and is a smooth ride. And if you're going to Seton Hospital from 101 slow down around the turn on the on ramp onto 280 because there is a GIANT bump that will knock your partner in the back's head into the ceiling and not be comfortable for the patient on the gurney.
Map books were no fun but some of the dudes I worked with definitely became route-finding savants.
If I remember the story I read correctly, they just call it "The Knowledge". What a great name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge_(film)
It's available on YouTube (potential geoblocking notwithstanding):
>> for gunshots go to Highland, for amputations go to CalPac Davies, for heart attacks go to UCSF, etc
Oooft. My utmost respect. I could not do this job.
"Video gaming, but not reliance on GPS, is associated with spatial navigation" paper shows there was a significant association between self-reported weekly hours of video gaming and wayfinding performance.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027249442...
Tested with Sea Hero Quest
1. Those with spatial reasoning are less likely to develop Alzheimers
2. Ambo and Taxi drivers are less likely (for some reason) to develop Alzheimers AND their work leads them to develop good spatial reasoning.
Sorry if I am misunderstanding you.
So spatial navigational ability is another risk factor/biomarker (along with blood pressure, smoking etc)
The problems arrizing from alzheimers are so problematic, that the cabdrivers / ambulance drivers drive themselves to death before they enter the stats as alzheimers patients?
A bit like the famous bullet holes in planes from ww2
[0] https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-...
I’m a little skeptical of the category “ambulance drivers; not emergency medical technicians” as reliably coded, because people will often say so-and-so “drove an ambulance” when they were actually an EMT or paramedic. But it’s also not clear to me that would invalidate the findings.
That seems unattainable for anyone at all.
Man, Alzheimer's disease sucks. We need more investment and more research into this horrible illness.
Personally I'm curious about the impact of super-early diagnosis, decades before symptoms, and interventions that maximally slow progress.
- Is significant life-long usage of real-time mental spatial navigation protective?
- Are those who end up in these positions self-selected for better than average real-time mental spatial navigation and that above average performance correlates with protection against Alzheimer's.
Anecdotal, but I've spoken with many taxi and ride-share drivers, and my impression is that their decision to seek out and continue that line of work is almost always driven by outside economic considerations. I've never heard someone base their decision on their ability to perform the job.
That they’re consciously aware of
Or could be there some weird variable that's unaccounted for ? Do taxi drivers and ambulance drivers for some reason have more regular sleep patterns ? We know that is definitely helpful for Alzheimer's
Or maybe they just get great at napping on the job !
I worked as an EMT for about 4 months and for the first few weeks had to drive around while the Paramedic (we rode EMT/Paramedic pairs) quizzed me about "if we got a call at XYZ, how would you get there"
Talk about vivid dreams every night.
Roll enough different sets of dice and you'd expect some to end up being all sixes - that doesn't mean that set is rigged. Yeah, they're the ones you'd do further tests on, but it's not evidence in itself.
But that's why you do multiple testing correction
That could even be a form of therapy after diagnosis (which seems to become easier with biomarkers).
Ambulance Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 64.2 years.
Taxi Drivers: The mean age at death is approximately 67.8 years.
General Population: in the same dataset, life expectancy averaged 74 years.
The average age at which patients are typically diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease is between 75 and 84 years.
People in these jobs don't live long enough on average to get diagnosed, at the same rate. The same effect will happen in any job that lowers your life expectancy.
I wonder what about gta players. And does playing GTA mainly in taxi count in
Dunno, did taxi driving for a few years. Mostly suburban for a small fleet, not gigging. I'm thinking newer drivers that rely on smartphones for navigation won't get the same benefit.
I seem to recall that at least some populations of taxi driver they have exams like The Knowledge (https://london-taxi.co.uk/the-knowledge/) where changes in structures of the brain can be measured after learning it.
My shitty ambo company sold our sleeping quarters as revenge when we tried to unionize and so we would have to sleep in the rig and would run the engine to keep warm, I am sure I will meet an early death from sucking in all those diesel fumes over night shifts.
But the first massively popular 3D games started end of 90s which means Alzheimer cases for them will pop up only around 2060 or later (average onset year 75 minus being 15 years kid during 90s).
Plus, digital environments are explicitly designed to be engaging: authors are putting intentional thought into making the virtual space easy to navigate so that the player doesn't get frustrated and go do something else.
Meanwhile, the physical world is something we're pretty much stuck in, and material spaces tend to be optimized not so much to be engaging to navigate and explore - more to be comfortable to inhabit, etc.
Besides, physical spaces - e.g. cities - tend to be iteratively developed over generations, bearing the hallmarks of many different thinking minds, and not optimized for any one particular user flow.
A sample of a sample of a sample...
My hypothesis is that it's either age, physical condition or both.
> Firstly and perhaps most importantly, selection bias is possible because individuals who are at higher risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease may be less likely to enter or remain in memory intensive driving occupations such as taxi and ambulance driving. This could mean that the lower Alzheimer’s disease mortality observed in these occupations is not due to the protective effect of the job itself but rather because those prone to the disease may have self-selected out of such roles. However, Alzheimer’s disease symptoms typically develop after patients’ working years, with only 5-10% of cases occurring in people younger than 65 years (early onset).1114 While subtle symptoms could develop earlier, they would still most likely be after a person had worked long enough to deem the occupation to be a so-called usual occupation, suggesting against substantial attrition from navigational jobs due to development of Alzheimer’s disease. Moreover, even if lifelong taxi driving selects for individuals with strong spatial processing, our findings would still suggest an interesting link between spatial processing skills and risk of Alzheimer’s disease.