Science Says Quitting Smoking At Any Age Is Good For The Brain

Summary

Short Wave – Science Says Quitting Smoking At Any Age Is Good For The Brain

NPR | Hosts: Emily Kwong & Regina Barber | Guest: Mary Louise Kelly
Release Date: October 17, 2025
(Total run time: ~10 minutes; Content summary excludes ads, intros & outros)

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Overview:

In this packed science news roundup, hosts Emily Kwong and Regina Barber are joined by NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly to explore three fast-moving science stories:

• New research on quitting smoking and its positive impact on brain health,
• A creative intervention to support language development in premature babies,
• And the quirky solution to Chicago’s famous “rat hole” animal mystery.

The episode blends evidence-based findings with NPR’s signature warmth and humor, giving listeners practical takeaways and memorable anecdotes.

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1. Quitting Smoking: Good for the Brain at Any Age

[02:16–04:23]

Key Points:

• Smoking and Cognitive Decline:
  • There’s a downward trend in cigarette smoking since the 1960s, particularly among those under 40 ([02:19]).
  • A new study in The Lancet Health Longevity Journal reveals that quitting smoking—even in middle or older age—improves cognitive performance ([02:30]).
• Physiology Behind It:
  • Smoking damages small blood vessels in the brain, restricting oxygen flow, which increases cognitive decline and stroke risk ([02:46]).
• Study Details:
  • Epidemiologist Michaela Bloomberg led a multi-country study tracking over 9,000 adult smokers for nearly 20 years ([03:06]).
  • Half quit smoking; the other half did not. Quitting smokers (regardless of age) did better on cognitive tests than those who continued to smoke.
• Broader Health Benefits:
  • Quitting as late as age 75 can extend life expectancy and lower risk of heart disease ([03:39]).
  • Cognitive health seems to follow cardiac health: “What’s good for your heart is good for your brain.” – Mary Louise Kelly ([03:53])
• Limitations & Optimism:
  • Direct link to lower dementia risk isn’t proven, but “cognitive tests are good predictors of dementia.” – summarizing Dr. Neal Benowitz ([04:02])

Notable Quotes:

• “Quitting later in life, it can help your brain.” – Mary Louise Kelly ([03:27])
• “What’s good for your heart is good for your brain.” – Mary Louise Kelly ([03:53])
• “Quitting at any age seems to show a benefit.” – Emily Kwong ([04:02])

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2. Supporting Preterm Babies’ Language Development

[04:23–06:57]

Key Points:

• Prematurity & Language Risks:
  • Full-term pregnancy is about 40 weeks, but the fetal auditory system is functional by 24 weeks ([04:44]).
  • Preemies (born before 37 weeks) are at higher risk for language development delays, possibly because they miss out on constant exposure to the mother’s voice—instead, they spend time in the noisy NICU ([05:09], [05:21]).
• Sound Intervention:
  • Dr. Melissa Scala (Stanford) and colleagues played recordings of mothers reading Paddington Bear to preemies in the NICU:
    • 160 minutes per night, across a cohort of 46 infants ([05:47]).
  • Babies exposed to their mother’s voices showed more mature white matter in language-associated brain areas ([06:15]).
  • The hospital now encourages all preemie parents to record themselves reading, illustrating the quick impact of this research ([06:48]).
• Limitations & Next Steps:
  • Study was small and short-term; researchers plan larger, longer studies to assess lasting language benefits ([06:30]).
  • Intervention benefits parents emotionally, too—a potential future research angle ([06:57]).

Notable Quotes:

• “The fetal auditory system actually starts to become functional at 24 weeks.” – Emily Kwong ([04:44])
• “I want to listen to my mom for 160 minutes reading me Paddington Bear.” – Mary Louise Kelly ([06:03])
• “They now give all preemie parents free books to read and the chance to record their voices.” – Emily Kwong ([06:48])

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3. The Chicago “Rat Hole” Animal Mystery

[07:06–09:26]

Key Points:

• The Urban Legend:
  • A sidewalk in Chicago featured an imprint shaped suspiciously like a rat. The “rat hole” became an internet sensation—so much so that some people held ceremonies and left offerings ([07:14], [07:25]).
• Testing the Evidence:
  • Zoologist Michael Granatosky (U. Tennessee) saw a scientific opportunity: Could the imprint be conclusively identified?
  • His team collected photos and compared the imprint’s proportions to museum specimens: rats, squirrels, mice, muskrats ([08:40]).
• Mystery Solved:
  • Conclusion: The print belonged to a squirrel, not a rat ([09:04]).
• Takeaway:
  • The story illustrates hands-on, crowdsourced science and highlights the fun and accessibility of scientific inquiry ([09:13]).

Notable Quotes:

• “You’re living life offline. We love that for you.” – Regina Barber, gently teasing Mary Louise ([07:17])
• “It’s definitely not a rat. It was a squirrel.” – Regina Barber ([09:04])
• “There’s something to take away here…encourage more people to explore the natural world.” – Emily Kwong ([09:13])

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4. Memorable Segments & Quotes

• “What’s good for your heart is good for your brain.” – Mary Louise Kelly ([03:53])
• “I want to listen to my mom for 160 minutes reading me Paddington Bear.” – Mary Louise Kelly ([06:03])
• “You’re living life offline. We love that for you.” – Regina Barber ([07:17])
• “There is science. There’s something to take away here.” – Emily Kwong ([09:13])

Segment Timestamps:

• [02:16] Quitting smoking and the brain
• [04:23] Language development in preemies
• [07:06] Chicago rat/squirrel hole mystery
• [09:13] The joy of accessible science

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Tone & Style:

Warm, engaging interplay rich with enthusiasm and humor—a hallmark of Short Wave. The episode balances scientific rigor with relatable storytelling, timely jokes, and genuine curiosity.

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Takeaways:

• Quitting Smoking yields tangible benefits for your brain—even if you’re older.
• Early Language Exposure (even via recorded storytime) may help preemies’ brains develop.
• Science is Everywhere—including viral street art—and accessible to all who are curious.

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(For additional details or related research, listeners are encouraged to consult the cited journals and follow up on future studies.)

Transcript

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[Regina Barber]

You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

[Emily Kwong]

Hey, short waivers. Regina Barber here and Emily Kwong with our bi weekly science news roundup. This time featuring. And this is what I always say, because it's true. The legendary Mary Louise Kelly of All Things Considered. Welcome to the show again.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

I am delighted to be here. I will try to live up to that billing. Okay, I hear we're gonna be talking about why quitting smoking at any age is good for you. That's right.

[Regina Barber]

You hear that, dad?

[Emily Kwong]

It's important.

[Regina Barber]

Did you hear that? Okay. And we're also gonna talk about a new way to support the language development of preterm babies.

[Emily Kwong]

Plus, an urban animal mystery animal whodunit. Yes.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Let's go.

[Regina Barber]

You are listening to Short Wave, the Science podcast from NPR.

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[Regina Barber]

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[Mary Louise Kelly]

I didn't know there was a link. Gina kicks off.

[Emily Kwong]

Yeah. So the rate of smoking cigarettes has declined since the 1960s. That's when Congress required warnings on cigarette boxes. And researchers have found that people are more. More likely to try to quit smoking when they're under 40.

[Regina Barber]

However, a new study in the Lancet Health Longevity Journal shows quitting later in life can still be beneficial, and it could possibly lower your risk for dementia.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

And that's the interesting thing. I didn't realize there was a link between our Brains, our memory, and smoking.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Regina Barber]

So for that, we spoke to Michaela Bloomberg, an epidemiologist and lead author of the study. And Mikayla said that smoking can damage small blood vessels in the brain that can restrict oxygen flow, which can affect cognitive decline and lead to possible stroke. Strokes.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

And was her study looking at the question of even if you quit well into adulthood, it's still beneficial?

[Emily Kwong]

Yeah. Michaela and her team looked at survey data of over 9,000 smokers from 12 different countries for almost two decades. Half of them quit smoking, and the other half continued. And the survey included cognitive tests participants took over the years. And what the results showed is that people who quit smoking in middle age or even older age scored better than those who never quit.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

So even quitting later in life, it can help your brain. And I guess there's been research showing that quitting smoking can be beneficial for other parts of your health as well. Even later in life.

[Regina Barber]

Yes.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Yeah.

[Regina Barber]

Quitting smoking is better for your heart health later in life. A study in 2024 showed that even quitting around the age of 75 can extend life expectancy and reduce your risk of heart disease.

[Emily Kwong]

And so Mikayla, she wasn't surprised that quitting smoking would help the brain too.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

What's good for your heart is good for your brain.

[Regina Barber]

So it's not an overly surprising result, but it's. It's surprising in that we didn't see that the effect kind of weakened with.

[Emily Kwong]

Age, meaning quitting at any age seems to show a benefit. Now, Michaela points out that the study can't definitively say good cognitive scores mean, like, a lower risk of dementia. But I talked to a physician who didn't work on this study, Neal Benowitz, and he's very optimistic about the findings, saying that cognitive tests are good predictors of dementia.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Later, on topic two, the far other extreme end of life. Tell me about language development in premature babies.

[Regina Barber]

Yeah. So a full pregnancy term is about 40 weeks, and in the womb, a lot happens. And hearing develops very early. The fetal auditory system actually starts to become functional at 24 weeks.

[Emily Kwong]

And as the weeks go by, the fetus can hear the sounds of the person carrying them. Here's how Melissa Scala put it. She's ucl, Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

You can hear mom talking all day long. Right. Because they're sort of a captive audience. Totally a captive audience. You're stuck in your mom's tongue the whole day long. I mean, that's true of all babies. Is there something distinct here about preemies yeah.

[Emily Kwong]

So preemie babies, those are born before 37 weeks. They're at a higher risk for delays in language development. Among very preterm babies, up to one third can have problems with reading or speaking later on.

[Regina Barber]

And scientists suspect that one of the reasons may be that because preemies come out earlier, they're in the NICU and not getting to constantly eavesdrop on the sounds of speech like they would in the womb. The NICU sounds nothing like the womb. And parents do visit, right, to do skin to skin contact, but they can't be in the NICU around the clock.

[Emily Kwong]

So Melissa and her colleagues tried an intervention using sound.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Sound as a sound person, as a radio person. I'm totally intrigued. What kind of sound?

[Regina Barber]

They played a recording of their moms reading the book Paddington Bear. Oh, yeah, I know. For 160 minutes every night, 46 preemies already in the hospital's care were signed up for this. Some got this intervention, some did it. The book starts, Mr. And Mrs. Brown first met Paddington on a railway platform.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

I love this. I want to listen to my mom for 160 minutes reading me Paddington Bear. How did the preemie babies react? How did it affect their language development?

[Emily Kwong]

Yeah, so it did help. Like, compared to the control group who didn't get the recordings, the babies in the intervention group had more mature white matter in key language areas of the brain. And the researchers published these results in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience this week.

[Regina Barber]

Now, scientists don't know the effect of this intervention long term. The study wasn't designed for that. It was a small cohort, just 46 babies. So Melissa says the plan is to repeat this intervention with a larger cohort of children who are even more premature and with whom the hospital can follow up in a year, in two years to see how their language develops.

[Emily Kwong]

And research like this has changed preemie care at the hospital. They now give all preemie parents free books to read and the chance to record their voices.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

I've got to think that's beneficial for the parents, too. That's a whole nother study we need to do. Okay, last one. Let's wrap up the urban animal mystery.

[Emily Kwong]

Yes.

[Regina Barber]

I'm so excited about this. Okay. Mary Louise, do you remember the 2024 viral sensation, the Chicago Rat Hole?

[Mary Louise Kelly]

I'm so happy to tell you I do not.

[Regina Barber]

You're living life offline. We love that for you. Okay. All right. So you know when someone makes a handprint in wet concrete, it hardens into a shape.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Yeah.

[Regina Barber]

Picture A Chicago sidewalk where there's a whole imprint shaped kind of like a rat. That's what it is. Comedian Winslow Dumaine posted about visiting this so called rat hole on social media. And people started flocking to it, leaving offerings. And there was even a wedding. We are gathered here today to marry.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Man and man in front of the honorable Chicago rat hole.

[Emily Kwong]

And all this caught the attention of zoologist Michael Granatosky at the University of Tennessee. He studies how animals evolve their movements. And in his scientific opinion, it looks.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

A whole lot like a rat. And so it's a good guess. A good guess. Was it the right guess?

[Emily Kwong]

Well, that's where this mystery comes in. Right. Like Michael was seeing posts on social media where people were guessing it could be a squirrel. Cause it was next to a tree.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

And he thought, what a great way to actually try and show the public that, you know, all of us are doing science when we take guesses.

[Regina Barber]

So Michael's team decided to turn this event into a research project whodunit.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Which is blowing my mind because I'm thinking, how do you scientifically prove that this was a rat that imprinted in the Chicago cement?

[Regina Barber]

Right.

[Emily Kwong]

Science is amazing. Right. So they collected pictures of the rat hole from the Internet since the actual imprint was actually removed last year. And using these pictures, they took a bunch of like, body measurements and they compared, compared these measurements to taxidermied animals from the American Museum of Natural History, from rats and squirrels to mice and muskrats. And they ran a bunch of statistics and they found it is not a rat.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

It's definitely not a rat.

[Regina Barber]

It was a squirrel.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

A squirrel?

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Regina Barber]

Chicago Squirrel hole.

[Emily Kwong]

Yeah.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

What are we supposed to take away from this mystery solve?

[Emily Kwong]

What are we supposed to take away from? Yeah, there is science. There's something to take away here. So other scientists we talked to say it's like a really clever way of highlighting how science is done. And Michael hopes it will encourage more people to explore the natural world.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

Explore the natural world as we love to do.

[Regina Barber]

Yes. And we love when you come on the show.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

It's true.

[Regina Barber]

It's true.

[Mary Louise Kelly]

I love it. I'll come back anytime.

[Emily Kwong]

You can hear more of Mary Louise Kelly on consider this NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for your. This episode was Produced by Kai McNamee and Burleigh McCoy. It was edited by Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Antalyada.

[Regina Barber]

Tyler Jones. Check the facts. The audio engineer was Simon Laszlo Jansen. I'm Emily Kwong.

[Emily Kwong]

And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening. To Shortwave the Science podcast from npr.

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