Crosswords and chess may help more than socializing in avoiding dementia | Hacker News Reader

Crosswords and chess may help more than socializing in avoiding dementia

medicalxpress.com

98 pointspseudolus42 comments

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.

Cargo culting activities that improve mental or physical health in general.

Copying someone who exercises is not cargo culting. There's a causitive relationship between excercise and health.

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.

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.

Healthy and wealthy people find it easier to exercise, too. There’s a dialectical relationship, not a one way cause.

That’s beside the point.

There are mountains of controlled evidence that exercise is extremely good for you.

Yes and we should all exercise.

Also, the effect is overstated because those that find it easiest to exercise need it least.

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.

>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?

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.)

Except that causality is frequently very obvious.

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.

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.

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?

> 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!

> Bill Bryon's "The Body"

Bill Bryson is not an actual expert on anything but a pop-sci journalist who writes whatever naïve 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.

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.

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..

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.

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.).

> 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.).

Good question - I'm also curious the effectiveness of this vs placebo. Does any regular critical thinking help stave off Alzheimer's?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In Asia, old people often play Mahjong and those who play often are unlikely to suffer from dementia

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.

> 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.

Scholars say that scholarly activities make you smarter.

May. May not. We don't know so this is a giant waste of time and money.

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