Elderly brain hack: How a Cold War spy test boosts fitness and sharpness

Yeah - I share your frustration.

Sage advice for those who are not on an OS that cannot be upgraded due to age of perfectly serviceable hardware. Some of us are, however. Websites that do not accommodate back-level browser versions (and why not? It’s just an effing website FFS!) tend not to get my business/eyeballs.

During the Cold War, U.S, intelligence agencies used the Stroop task to identify potential Russian spies by presenting them with a color-word test in Russian, where a native Russian speaker would slow down when encountering incongruent color-word combinations, revealing their ability to read Russian and potentially their true identity as a spy; whereas a non-Russian speaker would not experience the same delay because the words would be meaningless to them.

Sneaky buggers, those spy types, eh?

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