When I read about Keith McNulty starting his day by solving a math problem, I knew your headline had pulled me in for a reason. I’m not the only nutter out there anymore. It's amazing to see that others who are cleverer than I do the same crazy thing. Just in a slightly different way.

I’m working a lot with statistics, preferably the type I call forensic statistics. For many of my get-the-facts-right type of posts on health and healthy aging, I need to critically check the veracity of claims that medical researchers draw from the data that they publish in their papers. Particularly, when those claims make misleading headlines in the popular press.

Back to the morning routine. It is not so much about sitting down and solving a numbers puzzle by brute force of logic and reason. Rather it often happens to me that within a brief window of piercing mental clarity the solution to a problem presents itself as “blindingly obvious”. And always to problems that I had taken to bed with me, the evening prior. Only happens in the morning, and I cherish it.