Neuroscientist's three-step trick could help make your brain '50 years younger'
As you get older, you start to realise things change and one of the biggest changes you will notice is your brain. Things such as memory loss, becoming unable to retain as much information, and lack of concentration can happen, but there are little things you can do to retrain your brain and help lower your brain age, making it decades younger.
Simple activities such as challenging yourself and learning new skills can help with this, and speaking on his podcast Stay Young, Dr Michael Mosley shares ways in which you can even make it up to 50 years younger.
He explains: "Scientists have studied people in their 70s and found they were able to perform as well on memory tests as someone decades younger."
The trick was shared on Dr Mosley's podcast, Stay Young (BBC / Dragonfly TV)In a recent episode of the podcast, Dr Mosley spoke to developmental cognitive neuroscientist Dr Rachel Wu from the University of California Riverside, who is an expert in infant and child developmental psychology, who has previously conducted research that supports the benefits of challening yourself and your brain.
Dr Wu explained how children learn various skills all at the same time whilst growing up and she decided to test whether it would also be beneficial for adults to adopt this learning style as well. As part of her study, she took a group of older adults and had them get books out as if they were back at school. They had to do homework, learn langauges and try new skills such as photography.
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Learning both creative and academic skills, they were posed challenges, in a bid to sharpen their minds on things they didn't already know and amazingly, they started to perform cognitive abilities similar to those up to 50 years younger.
Speaking about her research to Dr Mosley, she explains: "The design of the latest study involved having a group of older adults that came in to do at least three new skills at the same time, and they came in for three months. They ended up spending about 15 hours a week doing homework and also sitting in the classes.
"The ages of these participants ranged from about 60 years to mid-80s. "We found that by the end of the intervention, they were performing in their cognitive abilities at the level of middle-aged adults 30 years younger than them."
After a year of the study, the results were even more surprising.
"[The people] were performing more like younger adults, so 50 years younger," Dr Wu added.
As well as improving their skills, the participants also managed to improve their attention span and memory too.
In order to sharpen your brain skills, Dr Wu suggests: "What we encourage people to do is take as much time as you can in your daily life to be able to learn new skills and the effects that you can see will be dependent on how much time you can put in, so the more time you can put in, the more benefits you might be able to see."
So it seems the trick is to find three different skills or hobbies that will challenge you and are all different, in order to help blow away that brain fog and lower your mental age.
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