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I read Graham Lawton's article on ageism with a degree of sadness ( 4 April, p 19 ). Yes, younger people will want to take over an older person's job because they want to get on in the world. That's human nature. But you still need a job, of course. I worked for many years …

I'm 75, yet I have never experienced the stigma Lawton talks about. That may mean I'm either oblivious to it or too self-centred to notice, but I don't think I am either of those. I interact with a lot of people younger than me by a generation or more, even though I wouldn't call myself …

As an aphantasic, I was fascinated by Shayla Love's article, "Think of an apple". One question that it didn't address is how people with aphantasia dream. My conscious mind's eye is completely blind – I cannot conjure up any images at all, but I am certain that I dream in pictures. One reason why is …

I appreciated Tom Gauld's proposed standard model of confectionery Easter egg structure. However, I fear it needs a rethink: I have an egg that, while possessing the chocolate shell exterior, fails to match any of the interiors mentioned by Gauld, as it contains a number of multicoloured sugar-coated chocolate sub-ovalic particles (Smarties) ( 11 April, …

As someone with total aphantasia, I found Shayla Love's article "Think of an apple" to be of great interest. I found out that other people could actually picture things in their minds only when talking to my wife some 10 years ago ( 11 April, p 36 ). She really struggled to believe that I …

Regarding negative attitudes towards ageing, even though I have a heart health condition, I hardly ever think of myself as old. I'm 64, but even before I was 28, I always had that specific age in my mind, and so I routinely think of myself as being 28 years old ( 4 April, p 19 …

In his interview, Michael Pollan says that plants have about 20 senses and "e only have five or six". That is a considerable underestimate. In addition to the traditional five senses, there are multiple senses falling under the general heading of "interoception", including senses of heart rate, distension of various organs such as bladder and …

The suggestion that switching from large to smaller prey drove the increase in brain size of early humans raises an obvious question. How did smaller-brained humans with the stone tools described manage to kill "massive plant-eating prey"? An animal is hardly likely to stand still and wait to be axed or clubbed to death at …

Stone Age seafarers had a good understanding of local conditions, wind directions and the local geography, without having the use of compasses. I would suggest that although it would have been difficult to find Malta from Italy, it would have been much easier to find Italy from Malta. It required only one sailor with sufficient …

It is not surprising that the asteroid Ryugu, among others, possesses the nucleobases that are core components of nucleic acids. I am reminded that the Murchison meteorite, impacting Australia in 1969, was replete with organic compounds, including a cache of amino acids and some nucleobases also found in terrestrial life ( 28 March, p 15 …