[HN Gopher] Crosswords and chess may help more than socializing ...
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Crosswords and chess may help more than socializing in avoiding
dementia
Author : pseudolus
Score : 82 points
Date : 2023-07-17 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (medicalxpress.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (medicalxpress.com)
| [deleted]
| AlbertCory wrote:
| As others have observed: there's a Selection Bias there. A
| randomized, controlled study would pick people and have them
| _start_ doing mental exercises when they weren 't already doing
| them. And then force them to keep doing it even when they didn't
| like it. Good luck with that one.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > In contrast, the size of someone's social network and the
| frequency of external outings to the cinema or restaurant were
| not associated with dementia risk reduction.
|
| That's not a good measure of socializing. Try actual
| conversations.
| [deleted]
| mcv wrote:
| Well, that is very good news for everybody in my family.
|
| Of course there are never any guarantees. I know very smart
| people who loves puzzles who still got dementia.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| May. May not. We don't know so this is a giant waste of time and
| money.
| swayvil wrote:
| Scholars say that scholarly activities make you smarter.
| lucas_membrane wrote:
| How could a study like this study six different categories of
| mental activity and not include a category for making music?
| Might be very informative to see that compared to those other
| categories, as it uses the same parts of the brain as the
| language-based activities, but quite possibly in very different
| ways.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| My guess is the effect is two fold.
|
| 1. On average people who love the crossword and chess tend to be
| smarter than those who don't, and intelligence is somewhat
| protective against dementia.
|
| 2. The people who get pre-dementia tend to drop out of
| cognitively demanding hobbies.
|
| And is most likely not, crossword puzzles and chess protect you
| from dementia.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| N=1 but my grandpa loved doing the NYT crossword and still ended
| up with absolutely terrible Alzheimer's. Notably the article only
| mentions a 9 to 11 percent reduction, so I wonder what the
| mechanism at play here is (or if there's some sort of reversed
| cause and effect here, i.e. people with a certain brain
| characteristic that reduces Alzheimer's are more likely yo play
| crosswords etc.).
| karmakaze wrote:
| I've heard of similar stories about sudoku being good to
| postpone/avoid dementia.
|
| The best explanation I've read is that the most important thing
| is how much you develop your mental capacity during your
| lifetime. The higher level you get to and maintain before mental
| degradation happens, the longer you can go without falling to
| dementia-related levels. So it's more of a start from a peak,
| rather than use-it-or-lose-it mechanism. i.e. routinely doing
| casual puzzles on their own may not make a great difference.
| mettamage wrote:
| People who do a lot of crosswords puzzles are fairly good at
| reading in general regardless of their educational level. This on
| its own opens up a huge way to exercise your mind: reading books
| (e.g. fiction) or reading other things.
|
| For chess, don't know how that one would work. If the thought
| patterns are generalized (i.e. thinking a few steps ahead) then I
| can see how that exercises the mind.
| randcraw wrote:
| Casual chess seems is entirely lookahead search, AFAIK. But
| competitive chess involves a lot more, from learning the
| classic strategies (openings, midgames, endings, combo play),
| to recognizing style and intent in the historical game play of
| masters, to creatively mixing broad strategies with narrow
| tactics, to sussing or psyching out your opponent. There's
| enough there to keep the little gray cells busy for a lifetime.
| hesdeadjim wrote:
| I'd love to see studies generalized to video games as a whole. To
| me it seems that any activity that actively flexes the brain
| should result in similar effects. I'd much rather play Factorio
| or Xcom than chess, or _shudder_ , crosswords.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I've been enjoying the NYTimes mini crossword puzzles enough
| that I pay for a subscription to their app to be able to access
| the archives of old puzzles.
|
| They usually take me 30-60 seconds to finish and are usually
| themed and topical.
| usgroup wrote:
| That "correlation is not causation" is obvious to researchers but
| they cannot pick the treatments in their study, so instead what
| they have to do is try to remove confounding factors instead.
| E.g. "people that play chess may be smarter than those that knit
| so we controlled for education level and IQ", and so on.
|
| Whether the study is convincing in the end will depend partly on
| how well the researchers covered their bases and dealt with the
| defeaters raised during the peer review process and before it. It
| is a standard issue with observational studies.
| yosito wrote:
| It strikes me as particularly naive to think that diseases which
| are physical in nature can be cured or avoided by some light
| mental exercise. This seems like a clear example of selection
| bias. Clearly, people who have dementia are not going to be
| spending their time doing crossword puzzles.
| jlmorton wrote:
| This study almost has Illness as Metaphor vibes. Fight dementia
| by diligently training your mind, keeping disease at bay!
|
| Vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia, and Alzheimers all seem to
| involve damage to brain structures. It strikes me as unlikely
| that you can chess your way out of this. The causality is likely
| reversed.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Exercising your body seems to have all sorts of disease-
| delaying benefits. Why would exercising the mind be necessarily
| different? After all, when you're thinking hard you're burning
| extra calories.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Causality is never so obvious: When you are thinking hard you
| use more electrolytes. Deplete too many electrolytes in your
| brain too quickly and risk causing a stroke. Strokes may
| cause and are at least known to exacerbate dementia.
|
| (Calories are a bad metric. There's so much chemical
| complexity they intentionally avoid. Not all "calories" are
| spent the same way, especially when you are talking about
| brain chemistry. Optimizing for how much heat a brain
| generates is directly optimizing for the wrong thing because
| when the brain is literally smoking, that is a stroke and it
| is dying.)
| hattmall wrote:
| Except that causality is frequently very obvious.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I don't know what you are trying to say here at all. If
| causality was "frequently" obvious _most_ of science
| wouldn 't need to exist and the scientific process might
| just be a few steps shorter. Determining the difference
| between correlation and causality is _hard_. Always has
| been. That 's just scientific reality.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Because we have a lot off history of researching this topic,
| wherein the benefits of mental practice usually appears to be
| very specific and not general.
| taeric wrote:
| I am curious if this is as much a reflection on not knowing
| how to practice, versus only playing at it. If I weight
| lift but never progress above a 1kg weight, I would not be
| shocked that I don't get any of the advanced muscle
| benefits of weight lifting. Same for pretty much any
| physical exercise. If I don't push past my current limits,
| I am not surprised at lack of growth.
|
| To that end, playing sudoku, but only staying at the "1
| star" difficulty puzzles, I don't know why I would expect
| brain growth, as it were. Learning the strategies and
| modeling that is needed to solve the advanced ones, though,
| is a very different thing.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| I've noticed its a common thing wherein:
|
| 1. People imagine without any evidence, but only a
| plausible story, that X is good for Y (say for instance,
| vitamin C for colds, because vitamin C is involved in the
| immune system)
|
| 2. Study after study is done finding no benefit, but each
| study you quote, someone finds some nit pick about it
| "well maybe the dosage wasn't high enough" or "maybe they
| did/didn't take it with calcium" and then continue to
| believe there must be some way to derive benefit
| taeric wrote:
| I mean, this isn't wrong. At the same time, it took a
| long time for studies to show that ulcers are not just
| reactions to stress. Study after study for many years
| showed the opposite. This isn't even getting into the
| problems of studies with nutrition, in general.
|
| That said, I should be clear that I'm not pushing for
| learning some of these "brain games" for their own sake.
| I am more throwing out that equivalent of the Tyler
| Durden quote regarding chickens. :D
| racl101 wrote:
| > After all, when you're thinking hard you're burning extra
| calories.
|
| When I think really hard, I get depressed that can't solve
| the problem and binge eat junk food for comfort.
| taeric wrote:
| One of the neatest claims in the book Peak, to me, was that
| this idea is directly observable. Trained and practicing cab
| drivers had measurably larger "spatial areas" of the brain
| over others.
| 99_00 wrote:
| >This study almost has Illness as Metaphor vibes. Fight
| dementia by diligently training your mind, keeping disease at
| bay!
|
| >Vascular dementia, Lewy body dementia, and Alzheimers all seem
| to involve damage to brain structures. It strikes me as
| unlikely that you can chess your way out of this. The causality
| is likely reversed.
|
| Do you have a problem with exercising your mind because it
| won't work or because of some other reason related to Illness
| as Metaphor?
|
| Exercising your body to keep diseases at by is standard medical
| advice. Do you have an issue with that also?
| ljf wrote:
| Key is 'patients who routinely' - they didn't prescribe
| Crosswords and Chess - these are people already disposed to doing
| those things, which will be a subset of all people.
|
| I remember a friend taking up tennis for a similar reason (he
| read that those who play tennis, live longer) - but the article
| negated to note all the things in a person's life that will set
| them apart if they are a regular tennis player - which are not
| caused by playing tennis (relative wealth, free time, ability to
| easily travel to the location of tennis courts, job/family life
| set up that allows for hobbies etc).
|
| I didn't tell him to stop playing tennis, nor do a feel that
| keeping an active brain is pointless - especially as it can help
| highlight when changes do happen.
| racl101 wrote:
| Cargo culting activities that improve mental or physical health
| in general.
| discreteevent wrote:
| Copying someone who exercises is not cargo culting. There's a
| causitive relationship between excercise and health.
| isk517 wrote:
| Depends, taking up exercise to improve your health isn't
| necessarily, but believing that you need to take up a
| specific exercise is a strong indication that your cargo
| culting.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Whatever works man. So many Americans are obese, I
| wouldn't diss it.
|
| For example, my friends always said I should try
| crossfit. I tried it 3 times all with failure. Then I
| began indoor rock climbing because my friend lost weight
| doing it. I tried it and loved it. Now I'm 30kg lighter.
| Took a couple of years, but whatever.
|
| My conclusion: whatever keeps you going.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Healthy and wealthy people find it easier to exercise, too.
| There's a dialectical relationship, not a one way cause.
| comfypotato wrote:
| That's beside the point.
|
| There are mountains of controlled evidence that exercise
| is extremely good for you.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| Yes and we should all exercise.
|
| Also, the effect is overstated because those that find it
| easiest to exercise need it least.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| In Asia, old people often play Mahjong and those who play often
| are unlikely to suffer from dementia
| everdrive wrote:
| I wonder what the actual mechanism is here. I'm sort of under the
| impression that dementia is a literal destruction of brain tissue
| at some level. (Via atrophy of tissue, or plaque buildup, or
| other things)
|
| People talk about how staying active helps stave off dementia,
| but what does this actually do? Are you just rebuilding
| connections in your dying brain, and therefore doing a bit more
| with less? Are you actually preventing some of the damage in the
| first place somehow?
| kypro wrote:
| No idea how true this is because I've not look into it all that
| much, but I believe some people believe alzheimer's disease to
| be a kind of 'diabetes of the brain'.
|
| I think I'm right in saying it's linked to inflammation so if
| you're in an inflammatory state say because you're diabetic,
| get little exercise, have poor sleep, etc you're more likely to
| develop alzheimer's.
|
| My guess and I'm almost certainly wrong, but it could simply be
| that the people who are doing crosswords regularly are in a
| cohort of people that's less at risk of alzheimer's generally.
|
| I agree with you that it seems odd that cognitive tasks would
| be protective of alzheimer's (given what I understand of the
| disease), but I'd imagine those who do crossword puzzles
| regularly eat better, get better sleep and get more exercise.
|
| Would be interested if anyone can shed some more light though..
| jwestbury wrote:
| > People talk about how staying active helps stave off
| dementia, but what does this actually do?
|
| IIRC -- based on Bill Bryon's "The Body" -- there some good
| evidence that this is a result of bone density, as bones
| produce hormones that may be important in whether Alzheimer's
| develops. There's been some fairly recent research in this
| area.
|
| It's important to note that I don't believe any of the
| available research establishes a causal link one way or the
| other, so it's possible that Alzheimer's causes a loss of bone
| density or that they're both caused by an underlying shared
| factor; but bone density _is_ correlated with dementia!
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| > Bill Bryon's "The Body"
|
| Bill Bryson is not an actual expert on anything but a pop-sci
| journalist who writes whatever naive publishers will accept.
| As a linguist, I was shocked that his book on the history of
| English ( _The Mother Tongue_ ) has a factual error or urban
| legend on virtually every single page, and so I would not
| trust him about any other subjects either.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| My guess is activity helps your cognitive systems through
| better blood flow, reduced risk of cardiovascular events which
| can set you up for dementia. And probably a minor effect from
| increased trophic factors like BDNF.
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