Stay Sharp as You Age

Older people show significant cognitive benefits from learning new skills 

I N MANY ADULTS, learning and thinking plateau and then begin to decline as early as age 30. People start to perform slightly worse in tests of cognitive abilities such as processing speed, the rate at which someone does a mental task. The slide becomes steeper in their mid-60s. These changes are often ascribed to normal aging. But they may instead represent something more like the “summer slide” that some schoolchildren experience in academic progress during summer break. After formal education and job training end, many adults undergo years of reduced learning opportunities. Work by one of us (Wu) suggests that the cessation of learning is indeed a setback—but this decline can be addressed. A three-month intervention Wu and her colleagues designed enhanced participants’ memory and cognitive flexibility so drastically that their abilities came to resemble those of adults 30 years younger by the program’s end. And amazingly, they continued to improve long after the classes were over. In this intervention, the researchers provided an encouraging learning environment to 24 older adults between 58 and 86 years of age. Before and after, they tested participants’ cognitive abilities, including cognitive flexibility and working memory. (Whereas cognitive flexibility supports multitasking and attention, working memory helps people with short-term tasks such as dialing a phone number.) The older adults enrolled in at least three classes that met weekly, with each session lasting two hours, to learn three new skills. Course options included drawing, iPad use, photography, Spanish-language learning and music composition. Once a week the participants also discussed issues related to learning barriers, motivation and successful aging. Over the course of the in tervention, the participants’ cognitive scores for memory and flexibility improved significantly. In a follow-up study, Wu and her colleagues discovered that participants had improved further: their cognitive abilities after one year were similar to those of adults 50 years younger. In other words, giving these seniors a supportive and structured multicourse routine seemed to eventually bring up their abilities to levels similar to those of college students. The team is still investigating why cognitive scores continued to climb ater the program’s end, but one possibility is that the experience encouraged these adults to con[1]tinue learning and practice new skills. To be clear, we do not think that formal education is the only or most important way to support learning. Our idea is to instead create enriched environments for older adults, es[1]pecially for those with few resources, so they can increase both real-world skills and cognitive abilities over the long term. If, as these studies indicate, interrupted learning is indeed a common feature of adulthood, many important implications follow. Older adults are often assumed to be on a downward slope with unrecoverable loss. “Use it or lose it,” the saying goes. Our work suggests that we need to apply a more hopeful mindset and vocabulary when discussing older people. Decline, as we so often see it, may not be inevitable. The question now is: How can society maximize adults’ chances to keep learning? Educators and scientists know how to educate children and adolescents, and we can adapt that knowledge to pursue existing options and develop challenging, useful and inclusive learning opportunities for adults. Researchers who work on the developmental and aging ends of the life span should share perspectives and communicate findings with one another. Finally, societies could provide resources and paths toward lifelong learning—particularly for older adults who are underserved or disadvantaged—to ensure that everyone can benefit. Let’s shift the conversation about adults from staving off loss and decline, or merely maintaining what people have, to learning, growing and thriving.

Source: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN  BY RACHEL WU AND JESSICA A. CHURCH -