Exercise for your aging brain
If you're worried that your mental powers will decline as you age, a
new study offers hope that a relatively brief flurry of brain exercises
can slow the mind's deterioration.
The study, whose findings were published last week in the Journal of
the American Medical Association, involved 2,800 men and women in six
American cities. All were healthy, 65 and older, and living
independently. Most participants were given 10 sessions of training to
improve a particular mental skill. A memory group learned strategies for
remembering word lists and textual material.
A reasoning group learned how to find the pattern in a letter or word
series. And a third group was trained to identify an object on a
computer screen at increasingly brief exposures.
No cognitive training
When tested five years later, these participants had less of a
decline in the skill they were trained in than did a control group that
received no cognitive training.
The payoff from mental exercise seemed far greater than we are
accustomed to getting for physical exercise - as if 10 workouts at the
gym were enough to keep you fit five years later.
Researchers have yet to find compelling evidence that the retention
of mental skills significantly improved the ability to tackle everyday
tasks, like handling money or following instructions on a medicine
bottle.
But there are encouraging hints in the data that brain exercises may
well help, a critical factor in determining whether elderly Americans
can live independently.
If further studies show that mental exercises can improve everyday
functioning, doctors may need to prescribe such training, senior centers
may want to set up "brain gyms," and aging Americans would be wise to do
brain-stretching activities. For this purpose, even the Medicare
prescription drug program, which critics deem too confusing for many
older people to navigate, could prove an unexpected blessing.
Spend 10 hours mastering its intricacies today and you could be a lot
sharper than your compatriots five years from now.
Guardian
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