How Aging Affects Our Brains

If you think your memory is getting creaky, the makers of puzzle books and video games are happy to remind you that their products can help you remember. But do they work? Can you really play your way to a better brain? Deborah E. Barnes, PhD, 41, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, who studies how aging brains work, sorts through the hype.

MORE: Do we necessarily get more forgetful as we age? Barnes: The conventional wisdom was that you were born with a certain number of brain cells, and that is all you have. So as you lost them, brain function slowed and your memory and other cognitive abilities started to slip. But we’ve learned that isn’t true. The brain is incredibly plastic and capable of change. So although brain cells, or neurons, die as your body ages, it’s also possible to create new neurons, especially in the areas that involve learning and memory. The connections between those neurons, which are almost as important as the neurons themselves, are also constantly changing, so you can always create new connections as well. And it doesn’t matter how old you are — you can train your brain at any time: We see it in kids, in middle-aged people, and even in those with Alzheimer’s disease. No excuses! A big exception is advanced dementia. At that point, connections between neurons die and the brain doesn’t build new ones. You’re left with clusters of dead brain cells, so there probably isn’t much you can do to improve mental abilities. But that’s illness, not age.

MORE: How does menopause affect memory?Barnes: There are a lot of myths that memory declines when we go through menopause. Some women do report that they don’t feel as sharp. But if menopause were causing cognitive decline in your brain, you would expect that around the age of menopause, thought processes would decline faster in women than men, and that isn’t the case. Women and men experience similar rates of cognitive decline throughout life, because of age or diseases like dementia.

MORE: What about the books and games that promise to boost your brain? Do they help at all?Barnes: It’s likely that some games and books have benefits, but more studies are needed to determine whether they improve your daily brain function in a meaningful way. One study found that those who played video games had much faster visual-spatial processing skills than nonplayers. That’s your ability to track things in space and time, like when you’re driving and you keep track of your speed as well as the cars around you. So if you can play a particular video game faster and you take a test measuring that kind of tracking ability, you’ll do really well. But being good at the test won’t make you a better driver. What we’re finding is that you can train your brain to do specific things, and you can get better at those things, but it doesn’t carry over to other abilities.

Most games that promise to boost your brain and prevent cognitive decline are selling you marketing rather than science. They haven’t been evaluated in a research setting, so we don’t know whether they work. Even if companies cite scientific studies to support their claims, you should always question if the study was conducted or paid for by the company. And since so many inexpensive or free activities — like walking — have been studied and proven effective (see "Sharpen Your Thinking," next page), why waste your money?

MORE: So what does work? Can I improve crucial everyday skills, such as balancing my checkbook?Barnes: Practice does make perfect. If you’re starting to have trouble balancing your checkbook or maintaining your finances, you can keep those skills sharp with such games as Nintendo’s Brain Age (brainage.com) and the Smartbrain CDRom System (smartbrain.net), both of which include helpful math activities. If you want to improve your memory, you can use mnemonics, a technique by which you associate what you want to remember with verbal or visual cues (such as using "roygbiv" to remember the order of the colors of the rainbow).