Intelligence: We could learn a lot from the nuns of Mankato, according to Prof Robert Winston, scientist, author and current host of the BBC's Child of Our Time documentary series.
While many of us slouch on the sofa watching soaps, the elderly nuns in Minnesota are busy stimulating their minds with quizzes and crosswords. And it pays, Prof Winston says.
"The average age of those women is over 90 and frequently they live to over the age of 100. Their incidence of ill-health in the brain is rather uncommon, less so than in the general population."
The human brain is on Prof Winston's mind lately. He believes our brains are greatly under-used and he says we all have a lot more potential than we think. Just how we can boost our intelligence and keep our brains fit is set out in his latest book: The Human Mind - and how to make the most of it.
"With every new experience, the brain makes new connections so it changes physically and I think we don't expose ourselves to enough experience really," he says. "We don't expose our children to as many experiences as they are capable of being exposed to and I think that goes right through life, right through old age."
This becomes obvious when older people are put in nursing homes with very little stimulation. "Doing your knitting while you are playing bingo, and perhaps carrying on an animated conversation with the person next to you is much better than sitting at home doing nothing, watching Ant and Dec, for example."
Our dependence on television has increased to such an extent that 50 per cent of four-year-olds in the UK have a television in their bedrooms. While some television can be a stimulus, Prof Winston says children are missing a much greater stimulus, "a questioning and provocative and probing relationship on a one-to-one human basis with their parents."
That parent-child relationship is currently under scrutiny in the Child of Our Time series which is following the development of 25 children, born around the millennium, for their first 20 years of their lives.
The parents come under as much scrutiny as the children, with the focus on their parenting skills, or lack of them. Some commentators have said that the constant barrage of advice on parenting from experts is making parents feel inadequate and is causing them to lose confidence in their own skills.
But Prof Winston argues that programmes such as Child of Our Time is having the opposite effect. "It's empowering people. I think the reason why it strikes a chord is because so many people see this stuff and feel that actually it's something that they have also experienced or their children are experiencing."
As a fertility expert and professor of fertility studies at Imperial College, University of London, he has become a leading voice in the debate on genetic engineering. But he has little tolerance for the media's fascination in human cloning and the Frankenstein-like scenarios that are often raised.
"It is bizarre actually. It's completely bizarre, illogical and, I'm inclined to say, rather unintelligent." He is happier to talk about the possibilities offered by stem cell research and says it offers "some prospect" of helping the treatment of a wide range of degenerative disorders. "It's by no means certain that it offers us a major prospect but it is a promising area of biological research. It's one we quite properly should be looking at because there is a possibility of saving lives."
Prof Winston was in Dublin for an Irish Times talk on The Human Mind - and how to make the most of it .
