Complain All You Want, But Your Busy Schedule May Help Your Brain

NPR:

Single mothers, untenured professors, young reporters and on-call doctors might have a thin silver lining for their hurried days and response for the people who insist on slowing down: All that hustling may translate into superior brain power as you get older, as a study finds that the busiest people perform best on cognitive tests.

Sara Festini, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas, Dallas, and her adviser, Denise Park, published the study in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience on Tuesday. They tested over 300 people between the ages of 50 and 89 on cognitive functions including memory, reasoning and mental quickness.

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Or it could be that those who are “better endowed cognitively are more likely to take on more roles and tasks,” Margie Lachman, a cognitive psychologist at Brandeis University who was not involved in the work, writes in an email to Shots. But she also thinks the study has a promising and rather sanguine hypothesis. “Ironically, I am too busy,” she joked in one email. “At least my cognition [may] benefit.”

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