- As we age, we experience changes in our cognitive skills, with processing speed and working memory declining gradually throughout adulthood. But could being expert in a hobby or field of study help to slow the rate of that decline?
- A new study, in expert birders, suggests that it might. The study found that in these experts, regions of the brain related to attention and perception remain more structurally compact than in nonexpert controls.
- Researchers suggest that hobbies involving perception, attention and memory could help preserve cognitive skills as we age.
Research suggests that continuing to learn throughout your lifetime, and particularly as you age, can help keep the mind sharper, and protect against neurodegeneration.
Now a study suggests that being expert in a hobby that uses perception, attention and memory could also be effective at preserving cognitive skills.
The study, published in The Journal of Neuroscience, found that experts in bird identification had structural modifications in regions of the brain involved in attention and perception. The researchers suggest that these changes could mitigate age-related cognitive decline.
Emer MacSweeney, MBBS, MRCP, FRCR, consultant neuroradiologist and CEO and Consultant Neuroradiologist at Re:Cognition Health, who was not involved in this research, told Medical News Today that:
“This study provides intriguing evidence that high-level skill acquisition — expert birdwatching in this case — is associated with measurable structural differences in the brain, particularly in regions involved in attention and perception. […] These changes were linked not just to better performance on domain-specific tasks like bird identification but also to broader cognitive benefits such as enhanced memory for arbitrary information when linked to existing knowledge.”
The researchers recruited 58 people for their study: 29 were expert birdwatchers, 29 were novices. Experts ranged in age from 24 to 75, and novices from 22 to 79.
Both experts and novices completed a bird familiarity screening test. The experts’ mean accuracy was 99.67%, and the novices’ 37.32%.
The experts then completed a bird identification screening test to assess their knowledge of local bird species. They achieved a mean accuracy of 72.17%, showing that all were highly skilled bird identification experts.
After completing a practice phase, all participants underwent diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to assess the structure of their brains. This type of imaging measures the movement of water molecules within tissues, so can identify areas that are more or less dense.
During their MRI scans, participants had to perform a matching task where they studied cue images of birds and then had to identify the same species in a new photograph when presented with 4 alternatives.
In expert birders, several brain areas associated with attention and perception had lower diffusivity, meaning they were more compact (higher tissue density), a property usually associated with younger brains.
Erik A. Wing, PhD, corresponding author of the study, and a postdoctoral fellow at the Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Academy for Research and Education Toronto, during the study, and now a research associate at York University, Toronto, cautioned that their cross-sectional study could not prove a causal link between the brain changes and birding experience.
“However,’ Wing told MNT, “behavioral work from our group and others has shown that areas of specialized knowledge accumulated across life might be drawn on to support memory function in older adults.“
“Our study suggests that brain changes that are associated with developing specific skills persist well into older age, so this at least opens the possibility that types of cognition involved in that skill will benefit across the lifespan,” he added
Expertise could indeed help protect against cognitive decline, MacSweeney told us.
“The brain areas that looked healthier in expert birders are the same regions we use for attention, memory and recognizing patterns,“ she explained. “These areas help us focus, hold information in mind and make sense of what we see, and they are often some of the first to weaken as we age.”
“Because these regions are so important for everyday thinking, keeping them structurally strong may help the brain work more efficiently and cope better with age-related changes,” she told MNT, adding:
“While the study stops short of claiming that expertise prevents diseases such as Alzheimer’s, the concept of ‘cognitive reserve’ — where lifelong engagement in demanding mental activities builds structural and functional resilience — is directly supported here. Individuals with richer neural networks may tolerate age-related pathology longer before symptoms emerge, simply because their brains are better organized and more efficient.”
And that expertise can be in any field that uses attention, perception and memory.
“There is literature on brain changes associated with fields ranging from music to chess to ‘sports’ in the broadest sense (dancing to juggling),“ Wing explained.
“A lot of the work on expertise-related neuroplasticity shows patterns of brain change that reflect the content of the field of expertise — so changes to auditory processing regions in skilled musicians —and I’m not aware of research that specifically favors one hobby over. I think the best strategy may be to just go with one’s interest rather than trying to optimize for cognitive benefits,” he advised.
“The concept of cognitive reserve does not mean immunity to neurodegenerative processes, it means ‘delay’ or ‘mitigation’ of functional decline, not prevention,“ MacSweeney emphasized.
“While the findings resonate with a broader literature linking mentally engaging activities to healthier aging, future research should explore how different types of expertise compare and how lifestyle factors (social engagement, physical exercise, diet) interact with domain-specific training to influence brain structure and function,” she concluded.
