A three-year study of nearly 4,000 adults ranging from age 19 to 94 found that brain health can improve at any age, challenging the common belief that mental sharpness must decline as we get older. Participants spent just a few minutes a day on brain-training activities, and researchers found measurable gains across multiple aspects of brain health, including thinking clarity, emotional well-being, and sense of purpose.
  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    335·
    2 days ago

    Bullshit.

    The BHI is designed to detect both improvements and declines in brain health. It measures three primary areas: clarity, emotional balance, and connectedness to people and purpose.

    “The BrainHealth Index brings together about 20 metrics, including validated gold-standard measures like the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index and the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire, as well as tasks designed at the Center for BrainHealth to focus on more complex thinking skills,” said Lori Cook MS’02, PhD’09, CBH director of clinical research and corresponding author of the Scientific Reports study. “This battery of assessments produces insights into individual brain health and change over time. Progress is measured by comparing results with participants’ own earlier scores.”

    They couldn’t find a single metric that showed what they wanted. So they crumpled all the metrics into a big meaningless ball, and said sometimes in some aspects things get better compared to a prior self assessment.

    Like, it’s not even saying it worked, just that people believe it worked…

    And it seems like a reasonable expectation is that the elderly who saw improvement, just saw a short term bump from becoming more mentally active. It’s a good bump and people should stay mentally active.

    But acting like a small bump overcomes the natural effects of aging is fucking ridiculous.

    Like if a 600lb person loses 50lbs. It’s an improvement, but it doesn’t mean they’re healthy. Just less unhealthy.

    • Soup@lemmy.worldEnglish
      261·
      2 days ago

      So the article claims that people can improve, and improvement is necessarily based on surpassing prior, personal ability, and you’re mad?

      I didn’t see anywhere that they said that a 90 year old can get the brain of a 20 year old, only that it can still be improved at that age and we don’t need to resign ourselves to a degraded mind when we’re old. If we buy a new car it’ll never be as clean as it was off the lot, but that doesn’t mean it can’t at least be repaired and kept roadworthy later into it’s life.

      • blarghly@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        2 days ago

        I think this is a reasonable statement to make, but I also think this study isn’t great, in that it is mostly based on self reported data

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.worldEnglish
        23·
        2 days ago

        , only that it can still be improved at that age and we don’t need to resign ourselves to a degraded mind

        A reduced degrading is still a degrading.

        • Soup@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          If they beat their scores from before that’s still an improvement. That would imply that this isn’t just slowing the degradation but it’s actually reversing it slightly. Only slowing would imply that their scores would be worse, but less worse than expected.

          You have very strong opinions about this for someone with such a fundamentally low level of reading comprehension.

    • scarabic@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      I understand the suspicion but you might want to keep some daylight between “qualitative data” and “bullshit.”

      I completely understand that quant data is always more certain to work with, but to totally discount qual data leaves you utterly blind in a lot of fields where quant measurements are impossible to standardize.

    • Lemming6969@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      2 days ago

      I’d guess every 20 years after 20 years old, processing power drops by 50%. By 80 you’re almost 90% gone, fucking braindead in comparison to 20.