If only I had a (better) brain: Part II

Can we "train" our brains to be brighter, sharper, faster? 

A while back I wrote a post about a big study looking at "brain training". The researchers wanted to know whether training programs that look like video games (like Brain Age and Lumosity) could significantly improve brain performance on various tests. The results, in a nutshell, showed that while participants improved on the tasks they trained on (e.g., if the game involved ranking balls from smallest to biggest, the participants got *really* good at ranking balls from smallest to biggest), the improvement didn't carry over to general brain function.Turns out ranking ball sizes doesn't help you remember where you left your keys this morning.

Two years later, what's the word?

I'm going to shift a little from how I normally do things (review a single article) and tell you about findings I learned about at the recent Aging and Society conference. At the conference, several researchers talked about brain training in the context of aging. We know that as we get older our cognitive abilities decline - we forget names and words, misplace our shopping lists, and process information a little bit more slowly. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could just spend ten minutes a day playing games on our iPad and successfully counter this decline? Of course it would be fantastic. Not just for us, but also for the companies who are trying very hard to convince us to buy their products to improve our cognition.

The problem is that skills are specific. If you want to become a fabulous jazz pianist, you have to play the piano (preferably jazz songs, too). If you want to become a star ballet dancer, you have to practice ballet. If you want to become a better mountain biker, you have to mountain bike - road biking will improve your leg strength and fitness, but ultimately it won't make you a better mountain biker. So why should things be any different for brain skills?

As it turns out, they aren't. Two years later, nearly all the research conducted in the field of brain training is turning up the same results: people only get better at the tasks they trained on - the improvement doesn't cross over to more general skills, different skills, or everyday life. In one study, a researcher compared a commercially available brain training program with what she called an "active control" - a group that simply played regular video games like Tetris. She found that the group who spent time on the commercially available brain training program actually saw some aspects of their cognition decline compared with the control group. Bummer.

Now don't throw out your Brain Age game yet - everyone at the conference agreed that engaging your brain in training programs is better than not doing anything. And most of the researchers felt that while the programs don't work now, it's not to say they'll never work. We are increasingly more knowledgeable about how the brain works, what happens when we get old, and what different training tasks do. So it's quite possible that sometime in the near-ish future (don't ask me when) we could see the advent of brain training programs that do have a significant and lasting impact on cognition.

Until then, there is one thing you can do to have a significant and lasting impact on your brain health... And I'll tell you in the next post.

The little-known benefits of pumping iron

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, exercise is good for you and your brain. That being said, most studies looking at exercise and cognitive function evaluate aerobic exercise (the kind that gets your heartbeat going). The other kind of exercise, resistance training (strength training with weights), has not been of much interest, perhaps due to the old stereotype that has been plaguing bodybuilders forever: big biceps, small IQ (although big biceps never stopped anyone from becoming governor of California). Switch the young lads for older women, though, and a recent study from a team of researchers at the University of British Columbia (represent!) suggests that gaining muscle can translate into a better brain.

The study looked at 135 women between the ages of 65 and 75 over the course of a year. The women were assigned one of three groups: group one took a one-hour resistance training class once a week, group two took a one-hour resistance training class twice a week, and group three, the control group, took a one-hour balance and stretching class twice a week. The women were all evaluated for a range of cognitive functions at the start of the study, at the six-month point, and at the end of the study (at the 12-month point).

The bad news is that strength training for six months, whether once or twice a week, didn’t lead to any changes. The good news is that if you stick to it for a year, you only need to train once a week to see an effect. After 12 months, the researchers found that all the women who underwent strength training showed a significant improvement in attention. The researchers evaluated attention using the well-established Stroop test (see image below), where the names of colors are written in an ink of a different color (for example, the word blue is written in red ink). To assess attention, the participants were asked to name the color of the ink (and not the word) as fast as they could (try it!). The once-a-week and the twice-a-week resistance training groups significantly improved on this task, while the performance of the balance and stretching group slightly deteriorated.

This improvement in cognitive function didn’t come without a price. The women in the once-a-week resistance training group complained of joint and muscle pains more than the women in the two other groups. It seems that the sweet spot for both an improvement in cognition and a lower risk of pain is to train twice a week (at least). This makes sense to me: the more frequently I exercise, the more my body gets used to the motions. It is also worth noting that the researchers tested other cognitive tasks such as memory and these didn’t show any change with resistance training.

Overall, though, I think this study is great news. I know that many older adults shy away from rigorous aerobic exercise (even young adults… *cough cough*), so this could be an easier alternative to help with brain health. And even if the “brain benefits” of resistance training could be a little more impressive (like by curing Alzheimer’s disease, while we’re at it), on the plus side, strength training also improves gait speed (your natural walking speed), and an improved gait speed is associated with a significant reduction in mortality. So if you don’t exercise for your brain, do it for your lifespan.
Reference: Resistance training and executive function: A 12-month randomized control trial. (2010) Liu-Ambrose T. et al. Arch Intern Med 170(2):170-8.