Study: Being Social Keeps Mind Sharp

Oct. 31 -- New research suggests that just sitting around and chatting with friends may help keep our brains fit enough to fight off mental decline, especially as we age.

Yakking it up with cohorts, it turns out, may keep the mental machinery well oiled.

We've heard for years about what's supposed to happen as we get older. The old brain just doesn't click along at the same speed, the memory begins to fail, and the biggest intellectual challenge of the day may be deciding which channel to watch.

The way to fight that, so we've been told, is to keep the old noggin busy. So millions turn to crossword puzzles, reading and various hobbies, and that's supposed to help.

But to psychologist Oscar Ybarra of the University of Michigan, that picture looked very incomplete.

Mental Gymnastics

Ybarra was listening to the radio a few years ago when a report came on about all the things we can do to keep ourselves mentally sharper, like traveling and reading. But as a specialist in social cognition, Ybarra figured there was more to it than that.

"I thought about my grandparents, who lived to be quite old and remained quite lucid," Ybarra says. "They tended to be very active socially, and I thought there was something else going on here."

What was going on, he says, was the "mental gymnastics" that we all go through while interacting socially with others. We do it so often, and with seemingly so little effort, that we're unaware of the fact that just simply socializing requires a strong mental commitment.

"Especially when you're dealing with somebody you're trying to understand," Ybarra says. "You're trying to figure out what motives they have, what beliefs they have. That takes a lot of mental energy."

So Ybarra and colleagues from the University of Michigan and the University of Denver set out to determine if socializing really can help keep the brain in tune. In a new report, they say the answer is a resounding yes. And it doesn't just work for the elderly. They found that regardless of age, people who are more sociable suffer less mental decline than those who avoid social encounters.