Silver surfers are exercising their brains
Want to stay sharp as a tack? Then get surfing!
Researchers have found the Internet just might be a way to preserve your mental skills as you age.
They discovered older adults who started browsing the web experienced improved brain function after only a few days.
"You can teach an old brain new technology tricks," said Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatry professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of iBrain.
With people who had little Internet experience, "we found that after just a week of practice, there was a much greater extent of activity particularly in the areas of the brain that make decisions, the thinking brain - which makes sense because, when you're searching online, you're making a lot of decisions," he said. "It's interactive."
Small is co-author of the research, which was presented in Chicago at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting.
Weird Science Factoid: Cellophane is not made out of plastic. It's a plant fiber which has been shredded and aged.
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
