Neuroscience Discovered How One Type of Activity Stops Your Brain from Aging

How can you keep your brain agile and young throughout your life, even as you get older? By spending time on creative pursuits as often as you can. That’s the fascinating finding of a study by researchers from Universidad Adolfo Ibañez in Chile and Trinity College in Ireland, among others.

As the study’s authors note, earlier studies have shown a connection between creative activities such as playing a musical instrument and improved brain health. They wanted to know just how creativity affects brain health. So they first recruited more than 1,200 healthy people as controls, and then compared them to 1,467 research participants who spent at least some of their time in creative pursuits. This included dancers, musicians, visual artists and strategy-based gamers. (Real-time strategy-based games are complex and involve creativity.)

Using EEG readings, they determined each participant’s “brain age gap,” the difference between their chronological age and the apparent age of the participant’s brain. What they found was that creative people across all disciplines had younger brains than their non-creative peers. Dancers had some of the youngest brains compared to their actual ages. This isn’t surprising since previous research has consistently shown that strenuous physical activity also slows brain aging. This means that dancing, which is physically strenuous as well as creative packs a double dose of brain health. Strategic gamers had the smallest brain age gap, though they still saw benefits.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Inc.