Mental Exercise
Research (see “Long-term Effects of Cognitive Training on Everyday Functional Outcomes in Older Adults“) has shown that the benefits of the brain exercises extend well beyond the specific skills the volunteers learned. Older adults who did basic exercises followed by later sessions were 3 times as fast as those who got only the initial sessions when it came to activities of daily living, such as reacting to a road sign, looking up a number in a telephone book or checking the ingredients on a medicine bottle.
If anything there is a bigger payoff to mental than to physical exercise, because brief training sessions seem to confer enormous benefits as many as 5 years later.
The researchers divided the volunteers into four groups, including a control group that received no training. A second group was trained in reasoning skills — being asked to spot the pattern in the sequence “a, c, e, g, i,” for example — every other letter of the alphabet. A third group was taught memory skills, which involved remembering word lists and using visualizations and associations as memory aids. A fourth group was given exercises to speed up mental processing — being asked to identify an object flashed briefly on a computer screen while fighting off distractions.
Each of the groups being trained had 10 sessions, each lasting an hour to 75 minutes, and each session presented progressively more challenging problems. Compared with the control group, those who got memory training did 75% better on memory tasks five years later, those who got the reasoning training did 40% better on reasoning tasks, and those who got the speed training did 300% better than the control group.
The study tracked 2,802 healthy adults from diverse backgrounds who were, on average, 73 years old. Although it did not examine the effects of mental exercise on people who had begun to show signs of Alzheimer’s or other brain disorders, previous studies have pointed toward the conclusion that anyone can benefit.
To reap the benefits, people need to get outside their comfort zones. For someone who likes to solve crossword puzzles, it is important to make sure the puzzles get harder with time — or to start playing chess.
“Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds, Study Finds” by Shankar Vedantam