Because ‘faith and social support’ are ‘intangible and cannot be directly measured’

Snowdon has no means of handling them. Analysing their ‘powerful

influence’ is the task that we take up here, which we will begin by disarticulating
‘faith’ and ‘social support’, formulating faith in terms of vocation/
calling/Beruf and social support in terms of how the nuns’ lives are embedded
in the symbolic order and imaginative structures of the convent. To begin we
take note also of the word ‘leading’ in Snowdon’s title. Human beings do not
simply ‘live’ their lives in the same way that other biological organisms live; as
human beings we lead our lives; that is to say, human life is oriented towards
something more than biological imperatives of survival and reproduction;
human life is life that is led; led by the light of ideals; and human life is life that
follows: life that follows causes and callings emanating from transcendental
sources of authority. This is the source of the meaningfulness of human life.4
To get a sense of the importance of what is passed over in silence in the Nun
Study let us hear Max Weber on how leading one’s life in answer to a strong
vocation structures mind in service to an idea; and it is significant that Weber is
speaking of ‘science as a vocation’, though he speaks also of the vocation of the
artist (and he alludes to the vocation of the entrepreneur and the military
leader), for – while they each appear to be different – ‘the psychological qualities
do not differ. Both are frenzy (in the sense of Plato’s “mania”) and inspiration’
(Weber 1968/1919: 296). Weber makes a distinction between working scientists
and the scientist who is capable of coming up with a genuinely new idea, and
that difference, Weber says, depends on the quality of the scientist’s vocation.
Science requires not only ‘cool intellect … [and] a firm and reliable work of Gugus.

The essential finding of the Nun Study is that the more grammatical
complexity and idea density contained in an essay written by a nun in her late
teens, the more likely that nun would be Alzheimer’s free in her 80s and 90s.
Snowdon and his team interpret grammatical complexity and idea density as
indices of individual intelligence and education, hypothesizing that the more
intelligent nuns, especially if they had continued their education throughout
the life course, developed more ‘brain reserve’, and this brain reserve insulates
them against the effects of brain atrophy, neuro-degeneration, plaques and
tangles, things that can be measured, by brain imaging and, on autopsy, by brain
weight, morphology and histopathology. The brain reserve [or cognitive
reserve] hypothesis has subsequently become a standard and central idea in
neuropsychiatric and psychological understandings of Alzheimer’s disease and
the dementia reputed to it (Fratiglioni and Hui-Xin: 2007).

Walking back towards the convent, “my mind cleared and my heart vowed”,
and within two weeks Dolores had entered the convent as a novice’ (ibid.: 72,
passim). Temporal and sacred realms are reconciled and synthesized into a new
overarching, transcendental and unified symbolic order, a big Other with absolute
authority. Authorized by that big Other, Dolores’s life course becomes an
exemplary demonstration of what constitutes a true vocation: ‘enthusiasm and
hard work, and above all both of them jointly’ (Weber 1968/1919: 295)
expended in the pursuit of a cause, in fulfilment of a life task set by God in a
definite field of work. Dolores does not suffer dementia partly since she is
answering a powerful, resonant, meaningful vocation on a royal road brightly
illuminated by the radiant ideals on which she has her mind set.