Behavioural Interventions in Support of Healthy Brain Aging

Abstract

• Motivation: Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to change across it’s lifespan. These changes may occur due to genetics or the environment that each person is brought up into. Understanding how behavioural changes can enhance cognition may help delay the manifestations of disorders associated with neurodegenerative or neuropsychiatric conditions. • Hypothesis: For this study we hypothesized that individuals who spend their lives training to excel in a specific activity will present an enhanced cognition in old age compared to a sedentary lifestyle. • Experimental Procedure: In order to better understand how specific lifestyle activities have an impact on cognition, a comparison between four groups of people over the age of 60 was made. Expert musicians, meditators and athletes were compared to a group of people that led a sedentary lifestyle. Questionnaires were presented to withdraw demographic information, IQ and scores regarding their health and well-being. Brain wave activity and behavioural components were assessed using an electroencephalogram and tasks such as the Go/No-Go, the Short-Term Memory test, the Colour Search task and Resting State was recorded and analyzed. • Results: The overall results show that the meditation group excelled at attention tasks, whereas musicians and athletes tended towards higher inhibitory component. Entropy measurements were carried out and showed that higher values across all times scales were linked to expert groups, possibly translating in a higher amount of available brain resources, when compared to people who follow sedentary patterns.