Editorial

Front Page - Friday, December 31, 2010

I Swear...

Mental workouts benefits validated

Vic Fleming

We Americans spend billions on our physical well-being, “but there are no comparable efforts to keep people mentally agile and strong.”
This was according to a Washington Post article by Shankar Vedantam awhile back.
The author was addressing “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.”
Per the study, regular exercise sessions aimed at boosting reasoning skills, mental processing speed and memory may stave off mental decline in older and middle-aged people. Am I imagining things or did I just hear a huge chorus of “Sign me up!”
The research seemed to show that the pluses extended beyond specific skills learned by the test subjects.
Experts were cited as hailing the study as “a call to action for anyone who has ever worried about developing Alzheimer’s, dementia and similar disorders.”
Let’s look closer at the study:
Volunteers were put in four groups:
1. A control group that received no training;
2. A group that was trained in reasoning skills;
3. A group that was taught memory skills;
4. A group that was given exercises to speed up mental processing.
(It’d be my luck to draw into the first group–no training at all, Placebo City!)
All groups had ten 60-75-minute sessions, each progressively more challenging than the previous.
Vis-à-vis the control group, memory trainers did 75 percent better on memory tasks five years later; reasoning trainers did 40 percent better on reasoning tasks; and speed trainers did 300 percent better.
The study involved 2,802 healthy adults, with an average age of 73, from diverse walks of life.
“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.”
Researcher Michael Mar-siske, a clinical and health psychologist at the University of Florida, opined, “This kind of training works no matter where you are in society. If you think you have come to a time in your life when new learning is impossible and there are no benefits of continuing mental activity, the study shows that for a large number of people this is not true.”
While the subjects in this study ranged in age from 65 to over 90, Marsiske said the findings apply to people in their 50s or even younger.
I have one more year in my 50s, so there’s hope.
“Mental skills acquired earlier in life persist well into old age ….”
Yes!
Lead researcher Sherry L. Willis, professor of human development of Penn State, said that those who were trained “reported greater confidence in their ability to solve everyday problems.”
The study was published awhile back in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Its finding are, predictably, being touted by proponents of word games and puzzles.
That would include yours truly.
Vic Fleming is a district court judge in Little Rock, Ark., where he also teaches at the William H. Bowen School of Law. Contact him at vicfleming@att.net.

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