Save your memory?
A couple of years ago I spent the afternoon with a researcher whose specialty is cognition in older adults. Over the course of a few hours, she detailed the many ways her work proved that aging comes with a corresponding loss in mental capacity.
I’ve had cheerier interviews with coroners.
About the same time, I noticed a growing mania among friends about memory. Everyone over forty was sure the most commonplace forgetting presaged the end of mental capacities. Everyone under forty smugly assumed that an older coworker’s misplaced keys or a parent’s overdue library book was a sign of encroaching enfeeblement.
Stubbornly, I refused to join the worried crowds. I placed my faith in old rats. A 1985 study compared the brains of elderly rats kept in two different environments. One group spent their last days in a big cage with lots of toys and nine other rats. The other group lived in a small cage with no toys and one other rat. The socializing, playing rats died with thicker cortical regions than the rats bored before death. Experimenters didn’t test to see if the rats could balance their checkbook better as a result of their enriched environment, but the evidence suggested that stimulation means a healthier brain, no matter your age.
Since then many studies have analyzed the effect of keeping humans kept in boxes with toys and friends.
OK, just kidding.
But scientists have tested the effect of stimulation and training on brain function. Those experiments revealed that memory deficits can be improved. With training, people can remember longer and longer lists of words, for instance. But it is a lot trickier to come up with a training program that turns improved performance on a memory task into the complex cognition required to live independently.
Not to say it’s impossible. But a cognitive “cure” — if there is one — may be more complex than participating in regular Scrabble games. A study published in December showed that older adults who tutored elementary students in reading improved both their memories and executive function — the ability to organize and plan — compared to nontutors. Those who started the study in the worst shape improved the most.
So there’s hope. Also hopeful is evidence that aerobic exercise plays a role in improved brain function.
But let me speak for the lazy among us: All of this sounds like a lot of work — in the case of tutoring, rewarding, and important work — but work just the same. The rats improved by playing. What about us? Can’t we have fun?
A couple of researchers at Elmhurst College in Illinois say yes. Their study was published earlier this year in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition. The pair offers a fresh approach to cognitive improvement: acting lessons.
People who attended a twice-weekly acting class of the type students encounter in college improved their memories, reasoning skills, and speed of mental processing after four weeks. Their cognitive gains were compared to a group who took singing lessons and a third group who received no lessons. The actors showed more improvement than both the singers or the inactive group. Not even the singers showed much change. Memory improvements came even though the acting lessons did not require lengthy memorization. In fact, actors performed with script in hand.
This was not the first acting-cognition trial. An earlier experiment had similar results, but those folks were younger, educated, lived independently, and could walk without assistance. That led some to believe that acting wasn’t really the important variable. In this recent study, the participants were older — the median age was 82, compared to 74 in the earlier study. More than half used walkers, canes, and wheelchairs. Only 38 percent attended one or more years of college, and all lived in a subsidized retirement home. Still, the benefit of acting remained robust.
Considering how much of our developmental play in childhood revolved around pretending — we’re lions, we’re orphans, we’re superheroes, we’re Army guys, we’re Tiger’s quarterbacks — why shouldn’t our continued development share some of the same features? Maybe an acting class will open that door that most of us closed when adolescence began. It couldn’t hurt. It might be fun. You never know what you might become.
I know, let’s pretend we’re rats.
