This article deals with the impact of high activity -like photography or sewing- on the Brain in aging.
In fact, learning photography or sewing (quilting) are activities which use high process of cognition. When we grow older, our brain suffers from some changes. Those changes modify our cognition, more particularly because of the synapse are damaged, because the older persons have more difficulty to initiate a task (Park et al. 2014) and because of a motivation fail when the task must be realized.
That’s why, Mc Donough, Haber, Bischoff and Park (2015) want to analyze if having an activity of high process can modified our cognition in aging. They thought that learning a new activity can stimulate our synapse ans at the end improve our cognition and the difficulties to initiate activities. For these survey, they decided to evaluate the cognition of older persons with neuropsychological tests before and after the period of activity.
They recruited 39 older persons (aged between 60 and 90 years old) and they made 5 groups. There were three groups qualified of « High-challenge » : Photography, Quilting and Both. And there were two groups qualified of « Low-challenge » : a Social one and a Placebo one.
For both groups, they had to practice their activity during 15 hours a week and during 14 weeks.
For the social group, they just had to be gathered and talk about travels or culinary activities. For the placebo one, they had little activities which didn’t use high process of cognition (eg: listening to music, reading books..).
The results of this survey shows that the older persons from the High-Challenge groups have a modification of their brain functioning (tend to younger functioning) contrary of the two Low-Challenge groups. They noticed also that the engagement of older persons in high activities had an impact on their performances because they had the choice of the activity they had to do during the survey. So there is an impact of the motivation. Precisely, one year after the end of all activities, the High-Challenge groups had better performance in memory, attention and a higher brain activity than the Low-Challenge Groups.
To conclude, this survey shows us that it is important to had hobbies with high level of mental process because it protects brain of the aging damages and helps us to remain young.
Key Words :
Aging damages ; Photography; Quilting ; Brain functionning ; High level of mental process.
References :
Mc Donough, IM., Haber, S., Bischof, GD., Park, DC. (2015). The Synapse Project: Engagement in mentally challenging activities enhances neural efficiency. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 33(6), 865-882.
Park, DC., Lodi-Smith, J., Drew, L., Haber, S., Hebrank, A., Bischof, GN., Aamodt, W. (2014). The impact of sustained engagement on cognitive function in older adults: The Synapse Project. Psychological Science, 25(1),103-112.