HealthDay News reports on a study of the impact of Internet use on the brains of elders:
Surfing the Internet just might be a way to preserve your mental skills as you age.
Researchers found that older adults who started browsing the Web experienced improved brain function after only a few days.
"You can teach an old brain new technology tricks," said Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatry professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of iBrain. With people who had little Internet experience, "we found that after just a week of practice, there was a much greater extent of activity particularly in the areas of the brain that make decisions, the thinking brain -- which makes sense because, when you're searching online, you're making a lot of decisions," he said. "It's interactive."...
"We found a number of years ago that people who engaged in cognitive activities had better functioning and perspective than those who did not," said Dr. Richard Lipton, a professor of neurology and epidemiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and director of the Einstein Aging Study. "Our study is often referenced as the crossword-puzzle study -- that doing puzzles, writing for pleasure, playing chess and engaging in a broader array of cognitive activities seem to protect against age-related decline in cognitive function and also dementia."...
For the research, 24 neurologically normal adults, aged 55 to 78, were asked to surf the Internet while hooked up to an MRI machine. Before the study began, half the participants had used the Internet daily, and the other half had little experience with it.
After an initial MRI scan, the participants were instructed to do Internet searches for an hour on each of seven days in the next two weeks. They then returned to the clinic for more brain scans.
"At baseline, those with prior Internet experience showed a much greater extent of brain activation," Small said.
Doubtless some readers will recognize this as an updated version of the Proust and the Squid argument, which relies in part on fMRI studies indicating that the brains of literate people have specialized sections for quickly recognizing letters. What's interesting here is that you get a similar kind of stimulation with the elderly.
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