“Use it or lose it” is the standard advice for keeping a mind sharp, and it is offered so freely that it has stopped meaning anything. Do crosswords. Stay busy. Keep socialising.
In 2013, a team at the University of Texas at Dallas ran an experiment designed to find out whether any of that is true, and which parts. The answer turned out to be more specific — and considerably more encouraging — than the slogan.
The Synapse Project
Denise Park and colleagues randomly assigned older adults to different activities for three months, at roughly 15 hours a week.
The high-challenge groups learned something genuinely new and difficult: digital photography, quilting, or both. Real skills, taught by professional instructors, requiring working memory, reasoning and sustained effort. Five hours a week in structured classes plus ten hours practising.
The comparison groups were the interesting part of the design. One did social activities — interaction, field trips, entertainment. One did familiar mental activities at home, such as listening to classical music and completing word puzzles. One did nothing.
At the end of three months, only the high-challenge groups showed improvement in episodic memory, with some evidence of improved processing speed. The social group and the puzzle group showed no cognitive gains.
Park’s summary of it: engagement alone is not enough.
Why this result is better news than it sounds
Two things elevate this above the usual brain-training literature.
The brains changed, not just the test scores. Functional imaging in a subset of participants showed enhanced neural modulation — the ability to adjust neural response according to task difficulty. That pattern is associated with more efficient use of neural resources and less reliance on the compensatory scaffolding that ageing brains fall back on.
This matters because most cognitive training research shows people getting better at the trained task without anything transferring. Here the change appeared in how the brain handled an unrelated challenge.
Some benefits persisted for up to a year. After the intervention ended. Three months of learning something difficult, with effects still detectable twelve months later.
What makes an activity count
The comparison groups are what make this study useful, because they rule out the easy explanations.
It was not the social contact — the social group had plenty and gained nothing cognitively. It was not mental activity in general — the puzzle and music group were mentally occupied and gained nothing.
The distinguishing feature was productive engagement: sustained effort at something you cannot yet do, where working memory is loaded, mistakes happen, and the difficulty does not go away because you keep advancing.
That is what separates learning photography from doing a crossword. A crossword exercises knowledge you already have. Learning aperture, shutter speed and composition means holding unfamiliar concepts in mind while applying them badly, then less badly.
The uncomfortable feeling is the active ingredient. If an activity is enjoyable and effortless, it is probably not doing this particular job.
The realistic version
Fifteen hours a week is a research protocol, not a recommendation. Almost nobody has that.
What transfers from the study is the type of activity, not the dose. The features to look for:
Genuine novelty. Not a refinement of something you already do. If you have cooked for forty years, an advanced cookery course is less useful than a language you have never studied.
Progressive difficulty. Skills with visible levels — instruments, languages, crafts — build in the escalation automatically. Once something becomes comfortable, its value for this purpose drops.
Structure and instruction. Both high-challenge conditions involved taught classes. Teaching supplies the difficulty curve and the correction, and a scheduled class is much harder to abandon in week three than a personal resolution.
Production, not consumption. Making photographs rather than looking at them. Playing music rather than listening. Speaking a language rather than watching subtitled television.
Candidates that fit: a musical instrument, a foreign language, a craft with real technique, drawing or painting, chess at a level that beats you, or coding.
A separate randomised trial of 156 healthy older adults with no musical background found that weekly piano practice over a full year produced measurable skill acquisition — which is worth saying plainly, because a common assumption is that adults past a certain age simply cannot learn instruments. They can.
What to expect
The first weeks are unpleasant, and knowing that in advance is most of the battle.
Learning something genuinely new after decades of competence in your own field means being bad at something in a way you have not experienced for a long time. Most people interpret that as evidence they cannot do it, rather than as the normal beginning of learning anything.
Progress in adult skill learning is not linear. Plateaus are the standard experience, and they are where people quit.
Three practical suggestions. Choose something with an external structure — a class, a teacher, a group — so that showing up does not depend on how you feel that week. Give it three months before judging, since that is the timescale on which the study found effects. And pick something you have a reason to want beyond brain health, because “this is good for my cognition” is not a motivation that survives a difficult Tuesday.
Why this belongs here
Most of what this site covers is protective. Keep the fitness, keep the muscle, keep the connections, avoid the decline.
This one is different, and that is why it is worth the space. The finding is that a specific kind of effort improves memory and neural efficiency in people in their sixties and seventies — not slows a decline, improves a function — with some of it still measurable a year on.
The brain is not a fixed asset depreciating on a schedule. It responds to demand at every age we have looked at, in much the same way muscle does. The requirement is the same in both cases: the load has to be heavy enough to be difficult.
Which means the pleasant version of “keeping the mind active” — the puzzles, the quiz shows, the familiar hobbies — is not doing what people think it is doing. The version that works is the one where you are visibly, temporarily, rather bad at something.
This article is for general information and is not medical advice. If you are concerned about changes in your memory or thinking, speak to your GP.
Sources
- Park DC, Lodi-Smith J, Drew L, et al. The impact of sustained engagement on cognitive function in older adults: the Synapse Project. Psychological Science, 2014;25(1):103–112. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24214244/
- McDonough IM, Haber S, Bischof GN, Park DC. The Synapse Project: engagement in mentally challenging activities enhances neural efficiency. Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience, 2015. https://content.iospress.com/articles/restorative-neurology-and-neuroscience/rnn150533
- Park Aging Mind Laboratory, University of Texas at Dallas. The Synapse Project. https://agingmind.utdallas.edu/the-synapse-project/
- Association for Psychological Science. Learning new skills keeps an aging mind sharp. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/learning-new-skills-keeps-an-aging-mind-sharp.html
- Acquisition of musical skills and abilities in older adults — results of 12 months of music training. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11658158/
This article is for general information and is not medical advice. If a health problem is affecting your daily life, speak to your GP.
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