Mentally challenging activities key to a healthy aging mind

  • A small study shows significant changes in brain activity among older adults engaged in learning a cognitively demanding skill.

A study involving 39 older adults has found that those randomly assigned to a “high-challenge” group showed improved cognitive performance and more efficient brain activity compared with those assigned to a low-challenge group, or a control group.

The high-challenge group spent at least 15 hours a week for 14 weeks learning progressively more difficult skills in digital photography, quilting, or a combination of both. The low-challenge group met to socialize and engage in activities related to subjects such as travel and cooking. The placebo group engaged in low-demand cognitive tasks such as listening to music, playing simple games, or watching classic movies.

The high-challenge group demonstrated increased neural efficiency in judging words, shown by lowered brain activity when word judgments were easy and increasing activity when they became hard. This is a pattern of response typical of young adults, and was not seen in them before the intervention, or among those in the other groups. To some extent, these changes were still seen a year later.

Moreover, there was a dose-dependent effect — meaning, those who spent more time engaging in the high-challenge activities showed the greatest brain changes.

So did those who were oldest, perhaps because their brains were most in need, perhaps because they were the most disengaged. Most likely, perhaps, because both of these were true.

The bottom line, though, is that, while all mental stimulation is good in terms of building cognitive reserve, actively learning, and really pushing yourself, is what you need to get to, or keep at, the top of your game.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-01/ip-mca011516.php

http://content.iospress.com/articles/restorative-neurology-and-neuroscience/rnn150533

Reference: 

Related News

A training program designed to help older adults with

Comparison of young adults (mean age 24.5) and older adults (mean age 69.1) in a visual memory test involving multitasking has pinpointed the greater problems older adults have with multitasking.

A study involving 125 younger (average age 19) and older (average age 69) adults has revealed that while younger adults showed better explicit learning, older adults were better at implicit learning. Implicit memory is our unconscious memory, which influences behavior without our awareness.

A two-year study involving 53 older adults (60+) has found that those with a mother who had Alzheimer's disease had significantly more brain atrophy than those with a father or no parent with Alzheimer's disease.

Data from the Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging, begun in 1958, has revealed that seniors with hearing loss are significantly more likely to develop dementia than those who retain their hearing.

Shrinking of the

A new molecular compound derived from curcumin (found in turmeric) holds promise for treating brain damage caused by stroke. Turmeric has a long history of use in Ayurvedic and Chinese traditional medicine.

The new label of ‘metabolic syndrome’ applies to those having three or more of the following risk factors: high blood pressure, excess belly fat, higher than normal triglycerides, high blood sugar and low high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol (the "good" cholesterol).

Lesions of the brain microvessels include white-matter hyperintensities and the much less common silent infarcts leading to loss of white-matter tissue.

Another study has come out proclaiming the cognitive benefits of walking for older adults.

Pages

Subscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest newsSubscribe to Latest health newsSubscribe to Latest news
Error | About memory

Error

The website encountered an unexpected error. Please try again later.