Hav­ing a sense of con­trol over one’s life may be one of the most cru­cial mark­ers of suc­cess­ful aging. Aging indi­vid­u­als who feel in con­trol seem to know more about their health, be more likely to take actions to pro­tect it and thus enjoy health­ier and longer lives.

Stud­ies have shown that peo­ple feel less in con­trol as they get older. Could cog­ni­tive or brain train­ing boost such feel­ing and reverse or at least coun­ter­act that trend?

A recent study says the answer is yes.Do you remem­ber the ACTIVE study? This was a large ran­dom­ized con­trolled trial with thou­sands of adults over 65 that included 3 types of cog­ni­tive train­ing: mem­ory, rea­son­ing, and speed of pro­cess­ing. The par­tic­i­pants were eval­u­ated over sev­eral years. Results pub­lished in 2006 showed that peo­ple got bet­ter at the trained tasks and that this improve­ment was still present 5 years after the inter­ven­tion. The par­tic­i­pants in the speed of pro­cess­ing train­ing also improved in every­day (untrained) tasks such as read­ing road signs quickly.

.A 2010 study took the ACTIVE data and looked at the effect of the train­ing on the par­tic­i­pants’ per­sonal con­trol (sense of con­trol). Results showed that the rea­son­ing and speed of pro­cess­ing train­ings resulted in an improve­ment in sense of control.

Why? The authors rea­soned that this was observed because the train­ing focused on main­tain­ing or improv­ing older adults’ cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, which pre­served their inde­pen­dence dur­ing a period of their lives when cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties and per­for­mance are usu­ally declining.

One more rea­son to cel­e­brate neuroplasticity!

To learn more about the ACTIVE study, check out this inter­view with Dr. Jerri Edward, Co-Investigator of the study.

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