Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s – how complex mental maps and spatial reasoning protect your brain

By Hatim Sharif, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely than workers in almost any other job to die of Alzheimer’s disease. That was the surprising result of a 2024 study examining the death certificates of nearly 9 million people in the U.S.

These findings stopped me in my tracks because those two jobs rely on the same thing as my own work: maps.

I have spent more than two decades staring at maps. Not paper maps on a wall, but digital ones with multiple layers: flood boundaries draped over census blocks, car crash…

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