A snack bar on a street corner sees the same faces at nearly the same minute, every single day. Watch a counter long enough and you notice that the people who keep their wits about them in their sixties and seventies tend to share a few dull, reliable routines.

The Corner Counter: plain habits for a mind that likes to stay sharp

This section is written in English by the team behind a small snack bar in the Lapa district of São Paulo, aimed at an American audience somewhere past fifty and would like their days to keep a clear shape. Nothing here is medicine. It is closer to what gets said across a counter at ten in the morning, written down and tidied up so it can be read at home.

The idea is simple. A counter is a fixed point. People arrive, sit on the stool they always choose, open the paper, talk about one story, finish their coffee and walk home along the same route. None of that sounds like a plan for memory support. Yet each piece of it asks the brain to do a small job on schedule, and small jobs on schedule are the backbone of most advice about focus that holds up over time.

Pull a napkin

The three folded napkins are the essays. The five toothpicks are the short pages: a word list, a handful of quick questions, the house terms, who writes all this, and what we keep about visitors.

• 1The Same Stool, Every Morning: why a fixed seat and a fixed hour make the rest of the day easier to hold in mind.
• 2The Folded Paper on the Counter: reading one story slowly and then saying it out loud to somebody.
• 3The Walk to the Corner: going out on foot at the same time each day, and paying attention on the way.
• ·Counter lingo, small questions, the counter terms, who runs the corner and what we keep.

Each essay closes with a small token card. It is there for one reason: anything about your own health belongs with your own doctor, and the card says so in plain words before you close the page.