WP - Mental Workouts keep aging minds fit

Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds, Study finds

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 20, 2006; A01

Excerpts:

Ten sessions of exercises to boost reasoning skills, memory and mental processing speed staved off mental decline in middle-aged and elderly people in the first definitive study to show that honing intellectual skills can bolster the mind in the same way that physical exercise protects and strengthens the body.

The researchers also showed that the benefits of the brain exercises extended well beyond the specific skills the volunteers learned. Older adults who did the basic exercises followed by later sessions were three 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 -- abilities that can spell the difference between living independently and needing help.

...[ brief training sessions seemed to confer enormous benefits as many as five years later. That would be as if someone went to the gym Monday through Friday for the first two weeks of the new year, did no exercise for five years, and still saw significant physical benefits in 2012.

The study did not indicate that mental training can hold off all cognitive decline permanently. Rather, as is the case with physical exercise, strengthening the mind appeared to slow decline.

Sherry L. Willis, the lead author of the study and a Pennsylvania State University professor of human development, said those who had the training also reported greater confidence in their ability to solve everyday problems, and this was especially true of the group that got the reasoning training.

The results, being published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, are heartening, but Willis and Marsiske cautioned that the biggest challenge lies ahead, in getting people to apply the findings to their lives.

"It's just like physical exercise -- when we are approaching the new year we will buy a pass for the gym and go fervently in January and then slack off," Willis said. "Mental exercise is the same way. It has to be consistent, and it has to be challenging.

To reap the benefits, Willis said, people need to get outside their comfort zones.

(Photo credit: docman )

technorati tags:aging, cognitive, decline, AD, alzheimers, intelligence, exercise, JAMA, prevention, crossword, comfortzone, stretch, research, study