- Packing more into the day increases the opportunity to learn new things
- Also stimulates and challenges the brain, University of Texas study claims
- Positive effect held regardless of age or level of education
Fiona Macrae Science Editor For The Daily Mail
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If you have too much to do, don’t get stressed, get smug.
Research shows that busy people have sharper minds and better memories.
Scientists say that packing more into the day increases the opportunity to learn new things, stimulating and challenging the brain.
Importantly for those worried about age-related memory loss, the study was done on men and women aged 50-plus.
Packing more into the day ‘increases the opportunity to learn new things, stimulating and challenging the brain’
Some 330 healthy men and women in their 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s were quizzed about their daily schedules and put through a battery of mental tests.
The results showed that no matter how old they were or how well educated, a busy lifestyle was linked to a healthy brain.
Busy people processed information more quickly and had superior memory, reasoning and vocabulary to those who took it easy, the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience reports.
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Researcher Dr Sarah Festini, of the University of Texas at Dallas, said: ‘We show that people who report greater levels of daily busyness tend to have better cognition, especially with regard to memory for recently learned information.’
Episodic memory – the ability to remember specific events in the past – was also particularly good.
The researchers said that they didn’t prove that being busy is good for the brain.
For instance, it may be that people whose minds are still sharp do more things.
Busy people processed information more quickly and had superior memory, reasoning and vocabulary to those who took it easy, the University of Texas researchers found
However, keeping active likely keeps the brain active.
A spokesman for the team said: ‘Busy people are likely to have more opportunities to learn as they are exposed to more information and encounter a wider range of situations in daily life.
‘In turn, learning is known to stimulate cognition: for example, a recent study found that a sustained effort in learning difficult new skills, such as digital photography or quilting, boosts episodic memory.’
Researcher Professor Denise Park said: ‘We were surprised at how little research there was on busyness, given that being too busy seems to be a fact of modern life for so many.’
Writing in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, she added that future research could look at whether becoming busier boosts the brain.
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