By Laura Helmuth, Scientific American
If you don’t use your muscles, they weaken. Your brain also stays in better shape when you exercise. But this doesn’t just mean challenging your mind by learning a new language, doing crosswords or taking on other intellectually stimulating tasks. Researchers are finding that physical exercise is critical to vigorous brain health.
Cognitive Functioning
The idea of exercising cognitive machinery by performing mentally demanding activities is called the use-it-or-lose-it hypothesis. But dozens of studies show that maintaining a mental edge requires more than that. Other things—such as regular exercise, staying socially engaged, and even having a positive attitude—have a meaningful influence on cognitive functioning as people age.
Further, the older brain is more plastic than is commonly known. The stereotype that old dogs can’t learn new tricks is outdated. Although older people generally take longer to learn new pursuits and cannot reach the peaks of expertise that they might have achieved if they had started at a younger age, they can dramatically improve their cognitive performance through practice. As John Adams, the second US president, put it: “Old minds are like old horses; you must exercise them if you wish to keep them in working order.”
The news comes at a propitious time. The proportion of older adults in the US and in other industrial nations is growing as life expectancy improves: In 1900, 4.1 percent of US citizens were older than 65; by 2000, that had jumped to 12.6 percent. By 2030, an estimated 20 percent of us will be in that category.
Maintaining optimal cognitive functioning would enhance our quality of life through the years.
Research on How to Keep Minds Active
How to keep minds keen over an entire life span is a question philosophers have posed since the earliest writings on record. As Roman orator Cicero put it: “It is exercise alone that supports the spirits, and keeps the mind in vigor.”
Modern research in this field began in the 1970s and 1980s, with studies that demonstrated that healthy older adults can improve performance to a greater extent than had been previously assumed.
The earlier research did not fully address certain questions, such as how long adults could retain the new skills they had acquired through training, whether those specific skills would also improve other areas of cognition needed in everyday life, and whether the studies done with small numbers of subjects would be broadly applicable.
Recent research suggests that cognitive training can lead to substantial benefits for older adults on the tasks trained, and some of these benefits are maintained over time and may transfer to other tasks.
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Study on Benefits of Training
Toward the end of the 20th century, the National Institute on Aging funded a consortium of researchers to conduct a large-scale training study in a sample of older Americans.
In 2002, psychologist Karlene Ball of the University of Alabama at Birmingham and her colleagues published results on more than 2,500 participants older than 65 who had received about 10 sessions of cognitive training. They were randomly assigned either to a cognitive-process training group to learn how to excel in one of three areas—memory, reasoning or visual search—or to a control group of subjects who did not receive training.
At a follow-up two years later, the team randomly selected a set of the initial participants for booster training prior to evaluation. The results showed strong training-effect sizes in each group as compared with controls. In retests five years later, measurable training benefits were still present.
Working Memory and Executive Functions
More impressive, however, are recent training studies that focus on what psychologists call working memory and executive functions—how people plan a strategic approach to a task, control what they pay attention to, and how they manage the mind in the process. Psychologist Chandramallika Basak, then at the University of Illinois, and her colleagues showed that training in a real-time strategy video game that demands planning and executive control not only improved gaming performance but also enhanced performance on other tasks measuring aspects of executive control.
Some studies have also increased the amount of practice provided. For instance, Florian Schmiedek and Ulman Lindenberger of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and Martin Lövdén of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm asked 101 younger and 103 older adults to practice 12 different tasks for 100 days. Both younger and older adults showed general improvements in working memory.
Common Questions about How Physical Exercise Can Help Improve Our Brain Health
Maintaining a mental edge requires performing mentally demanding activities, exercising regularly, staying socially engaged, and even having a positive attitude. All these factors together have a meaningful influence on cognitive functioning as people age.
Recent research suggests that cognitive training can lead to substantial benefits for older adults on the tasks trained, and some of these benefits are maintained over time and may transfer to other tasks.
Psychologist Chandramallika Basak and her colleagues showed that training in a real-time strategy video game that demands planning and executive control not only improved gaming performance but also enhanced performance on other tasks measuring aspects of executive control.
