Last month, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a study that tracked more than 10,000 older Australians over the course of a decade and concluded that chess and other cognitively stimulating leisure activities may help reduce the risk of dementia.
It’s a view shared by Barbara Sahakian, a neuroscience professor at the University of Cambridge, who says that chess players, particularly those who play competitively in leagues and tournaments, become fast thinkers.
“Chess games are good for the brain as they require concentration, working memory, planning and problem solving,” she says. “Therefore, they activate the brain regions involved in those cognitive processes. This is like a brain workout but also means you get better in those forms of cognition.”
But chess is not the only skill that researchers have found to be beneficial later in life.
Card games or learning a language
Card games such as bridge or even poker, which involves many of the same calculating skills as chess, have also been found to hold benefits for maintaining or improving cognition as we approach our latter decades.
The JAMA study identified active mental activities, which included card games, crosswords, puzzles or taking adult education classes as being helpful for reducing dementia risk.
In 2020, American and Canadian psychologists also published a study in which they described learning a second language as being effective in delaying Alzheimer’s disease.
Tara Spires-Jones, professor of neurodegeneration at the University of Edinburgh, says that the idea behind all these activities is building up a really strong brain network by stimulating different parts of the brain at the same time.
“For the most part, the numbers of brain cells or neurons stay pretty stable across your lifespan, but these activities affect synapses, which are the connections between neurons,” she says. “As we grow older, we tend to lose synapses in parts of the brain, and if you do things that are very stimulating to your brain, you can make more connections, and you’re just more resilient to the damage that’s going on in the early phases of diseases like dementia.”
Dancing
It is well known that physical activity is also associated with lower risk of dementia, and Spires-Jones says that this is because it keeps the many tiny blood vessels in the brain healthy. Issues relating to the blood supply to the brain have been linked to greater rates of atrophy, or brain shrinkage, which occurs as we age.
Joyce Shaffer, a psychologist and behavioural scientist at the University of Washington, has found that dancing classes can be one of the most beneficial forms of physical activity.
“There’s the calorie burning from dancing that has an impact alone,” she says. “But because it’s a form of aerobic exercise, getting oxygen to the muscles, you have this increased supply of nutrients to the brain. This causes the brain to increase the production of a chemical called brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF.”
BDNF plays an essential role in keeping neurons healthy, and the brain agile, and capable of easily forming new connections, which is the essence of memory.
“When you do aerobic exercise, your brain cells create more BDNF, which makes them healthier, and it also makes the neighbouring brain cells healthier,” says Shaffer.
Playing an instrument
Nine years ago, a famous study in the International Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease examined twins, one of whom had learnt a musical instrument and another who had not. After following them throughout the course of their lives, the musicians were found to be 64 per cent less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment or dementia.
Researchers believe that taking up any kind of musical instrument in mid or later life can be one of the most powerful tools for maintaining brain health, because of the myriad pathways that music stimulates in our brain.
“People think that sound is just relevant to your ears, but it’s connected to emotions, memories, what we pay attention to, movement and even how we interact with our other senses,” says Nina Kraus, a professor at Northwestern University in the US.
Kraus, author of Of Sound Mind: How Our Brain Constructs a Meaningful Sonic World, believes strongly that it’s never too late to start. “Music teaches you to make these connections between sound and meaning, and once you tune your brain that way, you carry this through the rest of your life,” she says.
Bodybuilding
Most of us might associate bodybuilding with muscular young men in their 20s and 30s, but Shaffer has found that strength training in the gym is one of the most powerful ways of preserving your cognitive faculties, even more so than other forms of exercise such as swimming or running.
“All exercise stimulates a process called neurogenesis, which is the birth of new brain cells,” she says. “But if you stop running today, the benefits of that exercise decrease within just a few days. Yet when you build strength in your muscles, you not only give birth to new brain cells that day, but you have more and more neurogenesis even days later.”
