Paula Span
It began with a highschool typing course.
Wanda Woods enrolled as a result of her father suggested that typing proficiency would result in jobs. Sure sufficient, the federal Environmental Protection Agency employed her as an after-school employee whereas she was nonetheless a junior.
Her supervisor “sat me down and put me on a machine called a word processor,” Woods, now 67, recalled. “It was big and bulky and used magnetic cards to store information. I thought, ‘I kinda like this.’”
Decades later, she was nonetheless liking it. In 2012 — the primary yr that greater than half of Americans 65 and older were internet users — she began a pc coaching enterprise.
Now she is an teacher with Senior Planet in Denver, an AARP-supported effort to assist older folks study and keep abreast of know-how. Woods has no plans to retire. Staying concerned with tech “keeps me in the know, too,” she mentioned.
Some neuroscientists researching the results of know-how on older adults are inclined to agree. The first cohort of seniors to have contended — not at all times enthusiastically — with a digital society has reached the age when cognitive impairment turns into extra frequent.
Given many years of alarms about know-how’s threats to our brains and well-being — typically known as “digital dementia” — one may anticipate to start out seeing unfavourable results.
The reverse seems true. “Among the digital pioneer generation, use of everyday digital technology has been associated with reduced risk of cognitive impairment and dementia,” mentioned Michael Scullin, a cognitive neuroscientist at Baylor University.
It’s nearly akin to listening to from a nutritionist that bacon is sweet for you.
“It flips the script that technology is always bad,” mentioned Murali Doraiswamy, director of the Neurocognitive Disorders Program at Duke University, who was not concerned with the research. “It’s refreshing and provocative and poses a hypothesis that deserves further research.”
Scullin and Jared Benge, a neuropsychologist on the University of Texas at Austin, have been co-authors of a recent analysis investigating the results of know-how use on folks over 50 (common age: 69).
They discovered that those that used computer systems, smartphones, the web, or a mixture did higher on cognitive assessments, with decrease charges of cognitive impairment or dementia diagnoses, than those that prevented know-how or used it much less typically.
“Normally, you see a lot of variability across studies,” Scullin mentioned. But on this evaluation of 57 research involving greater than 411,000 seniors, printed in Nature Human Behavior, nearly 90% of the research discovered that know-how had a protecting cognitive impact.
Much of the apprehension about technology and cognition arose from research on children, typically focused on adolescents, whose brains are nonetheless creating.
“There’s pretty compelling data that difficulties can emerge with attention or mental health or behavioral problems” when young people are overexposed to screens and digital gadgets, Scullin mentioned.
Older adults’ brains are additionally malleable, however much less so. And those that started grappling with know-how in midlife had already discovered “foundational abilities and skills,” Scullin mentioned.
Then, to take part in a swiftly evolving society, they needed to study a complete lot extra.
Years of online brain-training experiments lasting a number of weeks or months have produced various outcomes. Often, they enhance an individual’s capacity to carry out the duty in query with out enhancing different abilities.
“I tend to be pretty skeptical” of their profit, mentioned Walter Boot, a psychologist on the Center on Aging and Behavioral Research at Weill Cornell Medicine. “Cognition is really hard to change.”
The new evaluation, nevertheless, displays “technology use in the wild,” he mentioned, with adults “having to adapt to a rapidly changing technological environment” over a number of many years. He discovered the research’s conclusions “plausible.”
Analyses like this will’t decide causality. Does know-how enhance older folks’s cognition, or do folks with low cognitive capacity keep away from know-how? Is tech adoption only a proxy for sufficient wealth to purchase a laptop computer?
“We still don’t know if it’s chicken or egg,” Doraiswamy mentioned.
Yet when Scullin and Benge accounted for well being, training, socioeconomic standing, and different demographic variables, they nonetheless discovered considerably larger cognitive capacity amongst older digital know-how customers.
What may clarify the obvious connection?
“These devices represent complex new challenges,” Scullin mentioned. “If you don’t give up on them, if you push through the frustration, you’re engaging in the same challenges that studies have shown to be cognitively beneficial.”
Even dealing with the fixed updates, the troubleshooting, and the typically maddening new working methods may show advantageous. “Having to relearn something is another positive mental challenge,” he mentioned.
Still, digital know-how might also shield mind well being by fostering social connections, identified to assist stave off cognitive decline. Or its reminders and prompts might partially compensate for memory loss, as Scullin and Benge present in a smartphone research, whereas apps assist protect practical skills like purchasing and banking.
Numerous research have proven that whereas the variety of folks with dementia is growing because the inhabitants ages, the proportion of older adults who develop dementia has been falling within the United States and several other European international locations.
Researchers have attributed the decline to a wide range of components, together with lowered smoking, larger training ranges, and higher blood stress remedies. Possibly, Doraiswamy mentioned, participating with know-how has been a part of the sample.
Of course, digital applied sciences current dangers, too. Online fraud and scams typically goal older adults, and whereas they’re much less apt to report fraud losses than youthful folks, the quantities they lose are a lot larger, in keeping with the Federal Trade Commission. Disinformation poses its personal hazards.
And as with customers of any age, extra isn’t essentially higher.
“If you’re bingeing Netflix 10 hours a day, you may lose social connections,” Doraiswamy identified. Technology, he famous, can not “substitute for other brain-healthy activities” like exercising and consuming sensibly.
An unanswered query: Will this supposed profit prolong to subsequent generations, digital natives extra comfy with the know-how their grandparents typically labored over? “The technology is not static — it still changes,” Boot mentioned. “So maybe it’s not a one-time effect.”
Still, the change tech has wrought “follows a pattern,” he added. “A new technology gets introduced, and there’s a kind of panic.”
From tv and video video games to the most recent and maybe scariest growth, synthetic intelligence, “a lot of it is an overblown initial reaction,” he mentioned. “Then, over time, we see it’s not so bad and may actually have benefits.”
Like most individuals her age, Woods grew up in an analog world of paper checks and paper maps. But as she moved from one employer to a different via the ’80s and ’90s, she progressed to IBM desktops and mastered Lotus 1-2-3 and Windows 3.1.
Along the best way, her private life turned digital, too: a house desktop when her sons wanted one for college, a cellphone after she and her husband couldn’t summon assist for a roadside flat, a smartwatch to trace her steps.
These days, Woods pays payments and outlets on-line, makes use of a digital calendar, and group-texts her kin. And she appears unafraid of AI, essentially the most earthshaking new tech.
Last yr, Woods turned to AI chatbots like Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to plan an RV tour to South Carolina. Now, she’s utilizing them to rearrange a household cruise celebrating her fiftieth wedding ceremony anniversary.
The New Old Age is produced via a partnership with The New York Times.
