Short Mental Workouts May Slow Decline of Aging Minds, Study Finds

"Ten sessions of exercises to boost reasoning skills, memory and mental processing speed staved off mental decline in middle-aged and elderly people in the first definitive study to show that honing intellectual skills can bolster the mind in the same way that physical exercise protects and strengthens the body.

Experts said the federally funded study is a call to action for anyone who has ever worried about developing Alzheimer's, dementia and similar disorders. Americans spend billions of dollars each year on their physical well-being, but there are no comparable efforts to keep people mentally agile and strong.

If anything, the study suggests, there is a bigger payoff to mental exercise, because the brief training sessions seemed to confer enormous benefits as many as five years later. That would be as if someone went to the gym Monday through Friday for the first two weeks of the new year, did no exercise for five years, and still saw significant physical benefits in 2012....

Sally Shumaker, a professor of public health science at Wake Forest University in North Carolina who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, said it pointed the way to a future in which mental training is made widely available.

'I can imagine a situation in which facilities are available in community centers and libraries and aging centers, where people can play some games that are specifically designed to improve cognitive ability,' she said. 'People are fearful of cognitive decline, and the idea that a small and simple intervention can have an impact is pretty compelling.' " [The Washington Post, via Smart Mobs, via Mary Ghikas]

Besides the obvious implications for video games like Brain Age and Big Brain Academy, it's great to see recognition from the outside world that libraries could play this type of role and provide this type of service.

Talk about continuous lifelong learning...maybe we have a whole new selling point for bibliographic instruction and teaching information literacy if we just repackage it correctly! Learn how to use your library as health benefit!