Highly Creative people keep favored routines. For ten days I’m writing about the routines of individual Creators, historical and current.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
Nobel Laureate Neurologist, Discovered Human Growth Factor, Italian Senator, Humanist
If you want to live to a 100, you might consider following Rita Levi-Montalcini’s routine: get up at five in the morning, eat just once a day, at lunchtime, keep your brain active, and go to bed at 11pm.
I might allow myself a bowl of soup or an orange in the evening, but that’s about it, she says. “I’m not really interested in food, or sleep.
The secret, she says, is work: she still goes to her laboratory every morning to supervise an all-female team developing her Nobel prize-winning research on brain cells, and in the afternoon she goes across town to her foundation in another part of Rome raising funds to help African women to study.
She remains a passionate advocate of the rights of women, and still remembers the thrill as a small girl of seeing women in uniforms driving trams in the First World War when the men were at the front.
I have never been ill, and I don’t see the impairment of my hearing and sight as a handicap, she says. She wears a hearing aid, and peers at you closely when you talk to her, but tells you – convincingly – my brain functions better today than it did was I was 20.
(Thanks to Richard Owens of The Sunday Times)
Filed under: Brain Care, Creativity by Habits, Creativity: Historical Perspective Tagged: | Habits of Creative People, Italian Creativity, Little Sleep, Nobel Laureates, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Routines of Creative People, Small Meals
