Expertise Protects Against Cognitive Decline
Neuroscience News • • health
Key Points:
- A new study finds that expert birdwatchers have more structurally compact brain regions related to attention and perception compared to beginners, indicating enhanced brain efficiency linked to their bird identification skills.
- These structural brain changes, measured by lower mean diffusivity, correlate with higher accuracy in identifying both familiar and unfamiliar bird species, demonstrating the impact of expertise on brain organization.
- The brain benefits observed in expert birders persist into old age, suggesting that complex hobbies like birdwatching may build a protective cognitive reserve against age-related decline.
- Older expert birders also show improved memory for unrelated information, such as faces, when it can be associated with their birding knowledge, highlighting cross-domain cognitive advantages.
- The research implies that engaging in
