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Very experienced bird watchers, who can quickly recognize many bird species, show differences in their brains compared to non-bird watchers. Specific brain areas that are important for perception, attention and memory in bird watchers are more complex in structure and also more active during a bird recognition task than the same brain areas in lay people. American researchers wrote this on Monday Journal of Neuroscience.
These brain areas also seemed to show relatively less aging in the older bird watchers, although this was not statistically foolproof. The accompanying press release suggests that birdwatching is a good training for your perception, attention and memory – and that it could help with cognitively healthy aging.
The research fits into a long line of studies into the effects of specific training on the brain. Playing chess, making music, exercising, multilingualism, thinking puzzles: it is all said to be ‘good for your brain’, make you ‘smarter’ or even protect against dementia. “But there are almost always comments to be made about this,” responds Wouter Weeda, associate professor of methodology and statistics at the Institute of Psychology at Leiden University. He was not involved in the new study, but can say something about it based on his specialization – statistics of brain research.
“There are two things relevant to these types of studies,” says Weeda. “The first is causality. From this type of experiment you cannot deduce that one thing causes the other.” It may also be that people become experts in a certain area sooner because their brains are structured slightly differently, he notes. Or that there is another underlying factor that explains the differences found. For example, the birdwatchers exercised more, were outside more often or had less stress.
You can investigate causality by following two groups of untrained subjects for a longer period of time, giving one group intensive training and not the other – but otherwise letting them do the same thing. In this case, for example, going outside. Then you can see whether the people in the training group show certain brain changes and people in the control group do not.
Complicated and expensive
“This study did not do that: it is a snapshot,” says Weeda. “Very understandable.” Such a perfectly controlled, long-term experimental design with a scanner is complicated and expensive, he explains. There are a few well-known studies that looked at brain changes over a longer period of time under the influence of training, including in people who learned to juggle (Nature2004) and novice taxi drivers who got to know all the streets of London (Current Biology2011). They showed structural brain changes over the years. Weeda: “This study fits perfectly into that picture, even though it is correlational evidence.”
But then there is the second question that is relevant according to Weeda: do these brain changes also make you smarter or sharper in other areas? Or will intensive training only make you very good at that one super-specific skill? “There are many indications that the latter is the case,” says Weeda. “Tasks in the scanner can hardly be translated into behavior in the real world anyway. All in all, there is little evidence of this transfer: transfer of skills between different domains.”
Finally, regarding the aging of the bird watcher’s brain, Weeda would have preferred to see more test subjects. Still, he finds the research interesting. “It is original, and it is otherwise well put together,” he says. “The researchers looked at the complexity of the brain tissue, but also at its activity. The interesting question is: which of the two comes first? What really happens in the brain during learning, aging or brain diseases?”
All these types of studies contribute to a better understanding of how the brain works, Weeda emphasizes. “We are increasingly discovering that the brain is more plastic than we previously thought. That makes it very interesting to continue to look at the link between use and change of the brain.” And spending a lot of time outdoors has all kinds of health benefits, including mental ones, he concludes. “So if you can also train your brain with birding, then that seems like a win-win to me.”
