Exercising One's Brain May Keep It Young

In laboratory studies of relatively young individuals, training in specific motor skills increased volumes of gray and white matter. Now, researchers in Europe have examined whether training middle-aged people in a real-life activity would yield similar benefits.

The experimental group consisted of 11 relative golf novices (mean age, 51), who received about 40 hours of training in golf skills, paced according to their individual learning curves. The 11 controls, matched by age and sex, received no training. On magnetic resonance imaging in the experimental group, gray matter increased from baseline in the dorsal stream of the visual cortex and in regions involved in motor learning (ventral part of the central motor and sensory sulci, ventral…