challenging hobbies are key to keeping older people mentally sharp suggests new research the study found that pensioners who take part in mentally challenging activities such as digital photography or quilting showed enhanced brain activity but the findings of the new study published in the journal restorative neurology and neuroscience show that taking up a new mental challenge may help maintain cognitive vitality recent evidence suggests that engaging in enjoyable and enriching lifestyle activities may be associated with maintaining cognitive vitalityhowever the underlying mechanism accounting for cognitive enhancement effects have been poorly understood researchers at the university of texas proposed that only tasks that involved sustained mental effort and challenge would facilitate cognitive function they compared changes in brain activity in 39 older adults that resulted from the performance of highchallenge activities that required new learning and sustained mental effort compared to lowchallenge activities that did not require active learning the highchallenge group showed better memory performance after the intervention and an increased ability to modulate brain activity more efficiently to challenging judgments of word meaning in parts of the brain associated with attention and semantic processing some of the enhanced brain activity was still maintained a year later the researchers said their findings show that mentally demanding activities may be an important element for maintaining a healthy brain into late adulthood study senior author doctor denise park said the present findings provide some of the first experimental evidence that mentallychallenging leisure activities can actually change brain function and that it is possible that such interventions can restore levels of brain activity to a more youth like state however we would like to conduct much larger studies to determine the universality of this effect and understand who will benefit the most from such an intervention first author dr ian mcdonough said the study clearly illustrates that the enhanced neural efficiency was a direct consequence of participation in a demanding learning environment the findings superficially confirm the familiar adage regarding cognitive aging of use it or lose it dr park added although there is much more to be learned we are cautiously optimistic that agerelated cognitive declines can be slowed or even partially restored if individuals are exposed to sustained mentally challenging experiencesdaily mirror