If you’re an avid bird watcher, you might be doing your brain a major favor.
According to scientists from Baycrest Hospital in Toronto, birdwatching could actually be a game-changer for slowing the cognitive decline that often occurs with aging.
The groundbreaking new study, which was published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that the skills linked to birdwatching—such as having a longer attention span, a keen eye, and a strong memory—are actually deeply beneficial to brain health. In fact, the study found that developing these skills could literally reorganize the brain’s structure, improving cognition.
“Our brains are very malleable,” lead author Erik Wing, told NBC News. He said his team chose to study birders because observing and identifying birds in their natural habitats involves a “unique merging of cognitive areas.”
In the study, researchers looked at the brain structures of 29 expert bird watchers and compared them to those of 29 novice bird watchers using a diffusion-weighted MRI. These two cohorts were gender-balanced and also the same age. During this process, scientists obtained functional and behavioral measures during a delayed matching task performed by the participants, in which they were required to identify local and nonlocal species of birds.
“[Birding] combines fine-grain identification, visual search and attention to the immediate environment and sensitivity to motion, pattern detection, building these elaborate conceptual networks of different related species,” Wing explained. “Also, you have to remember what you’re seeing and compare it to these internal templates,” or the images stored in our brains.
The scans showed that the portions of the brain linked to attention and perception were more compact in the expert bird watcher group, making them better at identifying birds. In fact, the water molecules in those brain regions were able to move more freely, which seemed to boost their ability to identify familiar and less-familiar birds.
While learning a new skill of any kind is crucial for improving cognitive health, this particular study argues that these birding skills are particularly helpful to the brain due to their complexity.
So, if you were looking for a sign to go look at some birds this weekend, here it is!
Read the original article on Southern Living