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.
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
When expert participants performed the bird-recognition tasks, particularly identification of unfamiliar birds, the more compact areas of the brain were engaged.
“Changes linked to expertise-related neuroplasticity both in terms of changes to brain structure (organization of brain’s cortical tissue) and corresponding function (different brain activity in these same regions as people view and remember birds) appear to persist across the entire age range. The implication is that developing skills that require sustained learning can leave measurable signatures in both brain structure and brain activity that persist across the lifespan.”
“We found that people who have spent years learning to identify birds show differences in both brain structure and brain activity — especially in regions that support attention and visual recognition,” Wing added.
Expertise could indeed help protect against cognitive decline, MacSweeney told us.