My twins turned 11 the other day. I’m thankful the endless nappy changing and interrupted nights of their infancy are in the distant past. But there are new stresses, such as becoming an on-call chauffeur – to parties, sleepovers and sports clubs. Then, as now, the end result is similar: I’m frazzled most of the time. Ask me to guess and I’d say that being a parent has probably accelerated my brain age. So you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon a new paper in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience by James K Rilling and colleagues that claims caregiving – including being a dad – is associated with having a brain that’s young for your age.

The study builds on past research that found mothers and fathers in their 50s had a younger ‘brain age’ compared with their childless peers – by about half a year. This was based on measures of their brain structure, such as white- and grey-matter volume, as judged against databases of hundreds of brains of various ages. The new study extended this pattern to grandmothers and people caring for someone with dementia, and the findings suggested the brain age benefit might be even greater later in life. Compared with controls, grandmothers and caregivers had brain ages that were between four and six years younger, on average (after adjusting for other factors such as income and BMI). Both the old research and the new suggest there’s a sweet spot – too many (grand)kids or too much stress and the brain benefits are reduced.

As to why caregiving is associated with lower brain age, the researchers propose various reasons, such as being more mentally and physically active, the emotional connection, and the sense of meaning and purpose that comes from being a caregiver. My brain feels tired, but it’s nice to know the responsibilities of parenthood might be keeping it youthful!

When I was an adolescent, time spent with my first girlfriend – a title very quickly rescinded – was as exhilarating as it was onerous. The cause of the former was straightforward, but that of the latter was specific to that juncture in my life: I felt that a beat of dead air was a solemn mark against me, and every moment must be filled with witty and memorable words. Before our meetings, I would tabulate, sometimes physically putting to paper, all the interesting, intriguing, titillating things I could mention. I treated hanging out like a state examination. You can imagine why she lunged at the first opportunity to become an ex.

But we remained – and remain – close friends, and some time after our ill-starred relationship ended, something indelible happened: we had our first real silence. Late in a balmy summer night, conversation extinguished itself and, for some reason, nothing else was said. I’ve had a lot of beautiful silences since then, but it remains the most poignant.

I was reminded of this experience by Emil Cioran, the brooding and sardonic Romanian French philosopher, who was actually capable of stringing together witty and memorable words. ‘True contact between beings,’ he wrote, ‘is established only by mute presence, by apparent non-communication, by that mysterious and wordless exchange which resembles inward prayer.’

Silences between people, of course, have all sorts of meanings, and Cioran is far from the only philosopher to write about silence. But here he incomparably evokes the strange intimacy that inheres in the best kinds of silence. Perhaps the next time you are fortunate enough to inhabit this kind of silence with someone important to you, you’ll think of ‘true contact’.

One of my favourite walking routes though London goes from Waterloo Bridge to the London Eye, across the Thames to Big Ben, up Whitehall, and on to Soho for much-needed refreshment. But this spring, when a friend was visiting me from the United States, something happened on that familiar walk that made me see my home city with fresh eyes.

At a crossing by Trafalgar Square, she stopped in her tracks, though the lights were green. ‘What’s that?’ She pointed to the light flashing, not with the usual walking man, but with two female symbols, intertwined. ‘Oh that,’ I said shrugging. ‘The gay traffic lights of London.’ They’d gone up years ago, for the annual Pride Festival, and were so popular, they’d stayed – a little like my friend and I, who had a blast running back and forth between crossings so she could photograph all the LGBTQ+ symbols. Though she lives in San Francisco with her wife, these lights tickled her pink – and now they had the same effect on me.

This is an example of what the social psychologist Clayton Critcher at the University of California, Berkley calls the ‘vicarious construal effect’. By seeing an experience through someone else’s eyes, you can capture a feeling you’ve lost – or one you never even had. In an interview, Critcher said: ‘Simply trying to think about what someone else might see actually changes the way we see and interpret what we’re doing, changes the emotions we feel.’

This effect works whether rediscovering your hometown or more fully understanding another’s lived experience. So next time you notice yourself becoming oblivious to the place where you live, try to see it through the eyes of a visitor. Or better still, invite one over and share their perspective.