http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/education/edlife/a-sharper-mind-middle-age-and-beyond.htmlA Sharper Mind, Middle Age and Beyond
By PATRICIA COHEN
New York Times
January 19, 2012
...
As it turns out, one essential element of mental fitness has already been identified. �Education seems to be an elixir that can bring us a healthy body and mind throughout adulthood and even a longer life,� says Margie E. Lachman, a psychologist at Brandeis University who specializes in aging. For those in midlife and beyond, a college degree appears to slow the brain�s aging process by up to a decade, adding a new twist to the cost-benefit analysis of higher education � for young students as well as those thinking about returning to school.
...
To isolate the specific impact of schooling on mental skills, Dr. Lachman and her colleagues tried to control for other likely reasons one person might outshine another � differences in income, parental achievement, gender, physical activity and age. After all, we know that the children of affluent, educated parents have a raft of advantages that could account for greater mental heft down the road. College graduates are able to compound their advantages because they can pour more resources into their minds and bodies.
Still, when Dr. Lachman and Dr. Tun reviewed the results, they were surprised to discover that into middle age and beyond, people could make up for educational disadvantages encountered earlier in life. Everyone in the study who regularly did more to challenge their brains � reading, writing, attending lectures or completing word puzzles � did better on fluid intelligence tests than their counterparts who did less.
And those with the fewest years of schooling showed the largest benefits. Middle-age subjects who had left school early but began working on keeping their minds sharp had substantially better memory and faster calculating skills than those who did not. They responded as well as people up to 10 years younger. In fact, their scores were comparable to college graduates.
�We have shown that those with less education may be able to compensate and look more like those who have higher education by adopting some of the common practices of the highly educated,� Dr. Lachman says.
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I think the causation runs in both directions. Mental exercise may keep someone sharp, but the predilection for mental exercise depends partly on intelligence.
