Mental ‘Workouts’ Could Keep Your Brain Young

Scientists have found the first compelling evidence that cognitive training can boost levels of a brain chemical that typically declines as people age. The results of this 10-week study back earlier animal research showing that environments that stimulate the brain can increase levels of certain neurotransmitters. And other studies of people have suggested that cognitive training can improve thinking and memory. So how does it all work? And by how much does it all work? Here to break everything down and help you understand how to keep your brain sharp is NPR science correspondent Jon Hamilton https://www.npr.org/people/2100615/jon-hamilton. To try out the cognitive exercises for yourself, visit Brain HQ https://www.brainhq.com/. Interested in more brain science? Email us your question at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 0:23Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Here's some advice for all you fitness fanatics. Never skip Brain Day. That's right. It's time to talk about improving your cognitive fitness. And here to lead today's masterclass is NPR's resident brain trainer, John Hamilton. Hey, John.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Hey, Gina. Just finishing up my prefrontal reps here. Got to keep the old cortex shredded.

• 0:45Regina Barber?

  All right, let me add that to the list of images I can't unsee. OK, John, so what's cognitive fitness exactly? Like, are we talking Wordle? You know, because I'm pretty good at Wordle.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 0:56Regina Barber?

  Fine. Um, what about quadratic equations? Numbers?

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 1:01Regina Barber?

  Hmm. What about like a few races in Mario Kart? Maybe those Zelda puzzles that I do?

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Strike three. Those all focus on really narrow skills. You know, word recognition, number processing, throwing a turtle shell. Cognitive fitness is more of a whole-brain workout. You're trying to build up these broad areas like working memory, processing speed, focus. By the way, those are functions that tend to get worse as we age.

• 1:27Regina Barber?

  Yes. OK, not for me. I'm asking for a friend, John. Like, what sort of brain exercises do I need to do to avoid this whole, you know, brain aging thing?

• 1:36Speaker 02

  OK, let me show you something on a laptop. This is an exercise from a cognitive fitness study that we're going to talk about after the break.

• 1:43Regina Barber?

  Um, OK, here we go. It says, "Double Decision."

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Right, and this is a demo, so you're going to play along with them as they tell you what happens here. Go ahead and start it.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  In Double Decision, you will identify a vehicle and locate a road sign.

• 1:55Regina Barber?

  I'm already scared.

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Click the start button to begin.

• 1:57Regina Barber?

  OK.

• 2:00Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 2:01Speaker 00

  Let's try another.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  It's easy, right?

• 2:03Regina Barber?

  Yeah, I can do this. I can do this.

• 2:05Speaker 00

  As you improve, the vehicles will disappear faster.

• 2:08Regina Barber?

  OK, that one. Sign is here. Yep. That one. Sign's here.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  This gets harder.

• 2:16Regina Barber?

  OK, OK, OK. I wasn't looking! It's that one. Oh. Oh, I was way off. Oh, crap, crap, crap. OK, that one, sign's here. Happy brain training.

• 2:30Regina Barber?

  Okay, that did get harder. It totally got harder.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I could see that. I could see the smoke coming out of your ears. It was, it was real.

• 2:37Regina Barber?

  Uh, I thought it was, I was like, it was like a false sense of security. I was like, oh, this is so easy. And then it just got like way harder.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  But I mean, you get the idea, though, right? That this, this kind of training is a lot like, you know, serious athletic training. It's all about going for the mental burn. You know, you got to think Stairmaster set to 20.

• 2:55Regina Barber?

  It's all about reps, you know? Today on the show, cognitive workouts to keep your brain young.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Plus, how mental and physical exercise can work together to strengthen your mental muscles.

• 3:07Regina Barber?

  You're listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 4:26Speaker 03

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• 4:34Regina Barber?

  So John, this is where you tell me how my brain is going to stay young forever, just like my face.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, maybe not forever, but there is some cool new science here. Let me tell you about a study that provides the first really compelling evidence that cognitive training can cause biological changes in the brain.

• 4:54Regina Barber?

  OK, so like the brain's version of washboard abs.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. You've probably seen some of those brain training products on the internet. You've got, you know, there's Lumosity, Elevate, Peak, Cognifit. And then there's the one that probably has the most science behind it. That is Brain HQ. They designed that training exercise that was making your head explode just a few minutes ago. Until now, the evidence that those products actually work has been mostly from studies of cognitive performance. So, you know, maybe somebody was able to process information more quickly, focus for a longer period of time. This new study found changes in levels of a really important molecule in the brain. It's something called acetylcholine.

• 5:35Regina Barber?

  OK, I've never heard of that before, but it sounds cool.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  And now you have.

• 5:40Regina Barber?

  OK, awesome.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Acetylcholine is both a neurotransmitter and a neuromodulator. So what it does is it carries messages around the brain, but it also affects the behavior of neurons. It neuromodulates. Unfortunately, as we get older, the levels of acetylcholine in the brain start to go down. And if you get Alzheimer's, they go way down.

• 5:58Regina Barber?

  Wow, OK.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  I talked about all that with a scientist at McGill University in Montreal. His name is Etienne de Villers-Sedani. And here's what he said.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Cognitive abilities start changing when we're about 40, 45. And it's the same for acetylcholine. For every decade after the age of 40, 45, you get around 2.5% decline in this neurotransmitter in key brain areas.

• 6:22Regina Barber?

  Oh, my gosh, I'm like, I'm like there. I'm so scared.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  And you should be, but but hang on. Etienne was part of a team of scientists that thought they might be able to do something about this. So they took 92 healthy people who were at least 65 years old. And then for the next 10 weeks, they had half of these people spend 30 minutes a day doing that double decision task, you know, the one that you just did.

• 6:44Regina Barber?

  OK, what did what did the other half do? I mean, were they just like doom scrolling on their phone like I do every night?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Actually, Gina, they were taking part in another one of your favorite activities. I'll let Etienne explain.

• 6:55Speaker 04

  The other group was also doing a type of training, well, training, like video games, if you will, like Solitaire and Candy Crush, which can be addictive, and a lot of people play this over and over again, but it doesn't engage the brain in the same way.

• 7:11Regina Barber?

  OK, I don't play Solitaire and Candy Crush anymore, but I do play Vampire Survivors, very addictive. What did these researchers find out? Like, how did these different activities compare?

• 7:21Speaker 02

  The researchers used a special kind of PET scan that measured acetylcholine levels both before and after the training.

• 7:29Regina Barber?

  So what is this like special kind of PET scan?

• 7:31Speaker 02

  It's a PET scan where they put a special substance in your brain that sort of lights up all of the acetylcholine, all these molecules of a certain type. And that way, they can tell whether there's more or less being produced in the brain.

• 7:45Regina Barber?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  And in this case, they focused on a brain area that's called the anterior cingulate cortex. It is involved in mental activities, like making decisions, detecting mistakes. And in people who played just the video games, there was no change in acetylcholine. Sorry, Gina. But Etienne says in people who did the cognitive training, there was an increase.

• 8:06Speaker 04

  It was about 2.3%, which is not huge, but it's significant, considering that you get a 2.5% decrease per decade, just with aging.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  In other words, Gina, brain training turned back the clock by about a decade.

• 8:22Regina Barber?

  Wow, so you're just like, you just keep up?

• 8:23Speaker 02

  That sounds good, doesn't it?

• 8:25Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  But I wanted to check on all this with an expert on acetylcholine. So I sent the study to a guy named Mike Hasselmo at Boston University. He directs the Center for Systems Neuroscience there, and I should say he's in his 60s.

• 8:39Regina Barber?

  OK.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  I asked Mike what he thought about the double decision task.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  Well, I have to say, it was compelling enough that I looked up the task myself and thought, maybe I need to be doing this.

• 8:49Speaker 05

  Same.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Right? So I also asked him to give me some sense of how much mental boost you could get from, you know, this little acetylcholine bump.

• 9:00Speaker 05

  Drinking a cup of coffee is essentially directly increasing your acetylcholine levels. And I don't know the exact percentages, but you really notice quite quickly the enhancement of your cognitive function and your ability to focus.

• 9:13Regina Barber?

  OK, so I don't drink coffee. Now I'm thinking about that, too. But do I need to use this, like, particular cognitive training program? Or would I get, like, a similar result from, like, a different game or a different program?

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Well, you might, but it's really not clear.

• 9:26Regina Barber?

  OK.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  Brain HQ is part of a company called Posit Science that has really taken a much more academic approach to mental fitness than most of the other companies out there.

• 9:36Regina Barber?

  OK.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  There are now well over 100 academic studies that have used the Brain HQ exercises. They looked at people who had all kinds of different conditions, like ADHD, early dementia, traumatic brain injuries, and just normal aging. Couple of months ago, Brain HQ exercises were part of this huge study done by the Alzheimer's Association.

• 9:57Regina Barber?

  So, like, Brain HQ, these games, did it help, like, prevent Alzheimer's?

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Not exactly.

• 10:03Regina Barber?

  OK.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  The study was looking at whether this combination of lifestyle changes, you know, including mental exercise, could slow down the cognitive declines you usually see in people in their 60s and 70s.

• 10:14Regina Barber?

  OK.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  So there were more than 2,000 people in this study. It went on for two years.

• 10:18Regina Barber?

  That's a lot.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  It is. It was, you know, it cost them about $50 million to do.

• 10:23Regina Barber?

  Wow.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Some of the participants just got advice on how to eat better, exercise, stay mentally active. The others were given a very specific diet. They were enrolled in exercise classes, and they did Brain HQ cognitive training.

• 10:36Regina Barber?

  Hmm, OK.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Both groups benefited compared with, you know, typical people of their age. But the group that did intensive mental and physical exercise had better brain health overall.

• 10:46Regina Barber?

  So, like, how much of that was from brain training? Or how much was from, like, that specific diet and those specific physical exercises?

• 10:53Speaker 02

  There's no way to really break that apart.

• 10:55Regina Barber?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  But one thing to keep in mind is that studies have consistently shown that physical exercise is absolutely the best thing you can do for your brain health. So researchers are experimenting with ways to combine, for example, a cardio workout with brain training. I spoke with a scientist at University of California, San Diego, who is trying to do exactly that. She's using stationary bikes and virtual reality. Her name is Judy Pa.

• 11:19Speaker 06

  We tried to pair together cycling and moving through the environment. So they go through a new virtual reality task that we built. It's a park environment and they have to navigate through different scenes and try to remember where they're going. So they first learn it with arrows and then they have to recall it.

• 11:36Regina Barber?

  This sounds so great. Like, I want to sign up for these clinical trials.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  That's part of the idea, is that, you know, one of the biggest challenges with both mental and cognitive fitness programs is you got to find something that people will keep doing, even when they're not in a scientific study, right?

• 11:52Regina Barber?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  So I asked another brain scientist about that when I was at the Alzheimer's Association International Conference in Toronto recently. Her name is Jessica Langbaum, and she runs the Alzheimer's Prevention Program at Banner Health in Phoenix. This is her advice on lifestyle change.

• 12:09Speaker 06

  If you already do the Sunday crossword puzzle, and it's not challenging, maybe pick up something new. But really do something that you love to do and that you can stick to it. Find that exercise regimen that you'll adhere to and that you will continue to do. And if you can do it with people around you, that's even better.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  That social interaction seems to add something to any kind of cognitive or physical exercise.

• 12:33Regina Barber?

  Yeah, I got to join those running clubs, I guess.

• 12:36Speaker 02

  Exactly. And if you do, your brain will stay young forever.

• 12:40Regina Barber?

  Forever.

• 12:42Regina Barber?

  Thank you, John, for bringing this, this story.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Anytime, Gina.

• 12:45Regina Barber?

  This episode was produced by Hannah Chin. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Tyler Jones checked the facts, and Jimmy Keely was the audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our vice president for podcasting. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Short Wave from NPR.

• 13:05Speaker 03

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