Single mothers, untenured professors, young reporters and on-call doctors might have a thin silver lining for their hurried days and response for the people who insist on slowing down: All that hustling may translate into superior brain power as you get older, as a study finds that the busiest people perform best on cognitive tests.
Sara Festini, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Texas, Dallas, and her adviser, Denise Park, published the study in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience on Tuesday. They tested over 300 people between the ages of 50 and 89 on cognitive functions including memory, reasoning and mental quickness.
These same people also answered questionnaires on their busyness. "These are self-report data," Park says. "People who tend to report chronic busyness tend to report it as a stress. Like 'Oh God, I'm just so busy.' If you're chronically busy and dumping stress hormones into your body, that could be bad for your cognition."
[For more of this story, written by Angus Chen, go to http://www.npr.org/sections/he...-may-help-your-brain]
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