sweasel.com

Okay, so I’ve turned to my fallback – reading. In my thirties, I used to blast through books at a terrifying rate. Not bragging. I read a lot of unedifying books, like reams of trashy true crime. (If you ever run across someone starting a true crime podcast, I’ve got an astonishing library I’d like to give away intact).

I have just finished a couple of books on the brain and neurology (yes, it’s kind of the same thing but it was two different books).

In one of them (Jandial, Rahul. Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon: The New Science and Stories of the Brain (p. 32). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition. – did you know if you cut and paste text from a Kindle book, it somehow inserts those credits for you? Which is annoying if you do a lot of it).

Anyhoo! Dr Jandial was describing the ACTIVE study “the Advanced Cognitive Training for Independent and Vital Elderly (ACTIVE) study recruited 2,832 healthy older adults with an average age of 73.6 years at the beginning of the trial.”

Then they put them through a bunch of attention exercises. “The final group spent 10 hours playing a video game designed to improve their so-called ‘speed of processing.’ Five years later, the speed-of-processing group had had half as many car accidents as people in the other groups. Ten years later, those who had completed the most hours of training in the speed-of-processing group had their risk of developing dementia nearly cut in half — a finding that no drug or any other treatment has ever come close to achieving.”

Holy shit – ten YEARS later?

The National Library of Medicine has this to say about speed of processing training:

Latent growth curve models indicated that initial training effects were maintained over 5 years and amplified by booster sessions. A single booster session counteracted 4.92 months of age-related processing speed decline.

Article worth reading. I gather the initial training was ten one-hour sessions. The online version is (among others, I assume) at BrainHQ. You get one session a day free, or you can subscribe. Why is everything by subscription nowadays?

p.s. ladies, it’s worth doing a Google Images Search of Dr Jandial. He’s a fine figger of a neuroscientist.