OSLO, April 21 -- A Norwegian study, published in the journal Neurology, claims that mentally stimulating work may act as a bulwark against memory and thinking disorders later in life.

The authors of this research came to this conclusion after studying the career paths of 7,000 people in Norway. They sought to determine the extent to which the participants were cognitively stimulated by the different jobs they held during their careers.

To do this, the research team analysed the tasks the participants performed in the course of their work, before dividing them into four groups according to the degree of cognitive stimulation they experienced in their working lives. It turns out that teaching is one of the most cognitively demanding sect...