A New Way of Thinking

My dad had a handy test for checking my grandfather's mental acuity: he'd ask him about interest rates. Albert aced it every time. He didn't just know the rate; he could explain how it got there and project future probabilities. The intellectual stimulation of the financial markets helped sustain my grandfather throughout his waning years. He read the dailies, kept up to speed on politics and bantered in two languages (French and English). With a nimble mind came a fit body. Until the end, Albert exercised every morning and prepared healthy meals for himself. He passed away in 1997, aged 99.

Given his combination of longevity and brainpower, my grandfather had a lot to be happy about. Lately, I've started watching my own father age. This past June, Paul turned 83. He and my mother, Doreen, who is a few months younger, live together, unassisted, in Edmonton, Canada. Paul volunteers on a number of committees and boards. He recently started auditing university courses, and he golfs daily, something he never bothered to learn until after he retired. He's also active in the residents' association for their neighbourhood, which has him regularly solving problems. I used to think all the bustle might be the death of my octogenarian dad. Now I know better: it's what keeps him alive.

There are lots of great ways to stay sharp while the clock ticks away-reading, gardening, birdwatching, yoga, pottery-but new evidence suggests three specific activities can significantly raise the odds of enjoying our final decades. They might even be the most powerful antidotes to aging available.

Stephen Dyke is a 73-year-old retired Canadian physician. An avid boater, he became wary of going back on the water after a back injury four years ago. His wife suggested they learn Gaelic instead. Dyke admits grasping the language was very difficult-its complicated grammar and counterintuitive pronunciation make it tricky to pick up at any age-but he spent up to eight hours a day studying, and he and his wife now speak, read and write the language with ease. In fact, the couple spend their days speaking entirely in Gaelic. "Our level of comfort is something I would never have predicted," says Dyke.

Dyke, and the thousands of sen-iors taking foreign-language courses  prove that there's no age limit to picking up a language. Students in their 60s and 70s can-and do-become high-functioning speakers when they throw their full attention at the task. And research suggests the effort itself, irrespect-ive of proficiency, brings big mental dividends. The reason? While struggling with foreign grammar and syntax might leave you feeling like your brain is short-circuiting, it's doing the opposite: finding new neural pathways and shoring up old ones.

More precisely, says Ellen Bialystok, it's strengthening executive function. Bialystok is a neuroscientist at Baycrest Health Sciences' Rotman Research Institute, a brain research facility in Toronto that is today one of the world's top centres for study into memory and aging. Most of the scientists on the staff have dedicated themselves to decoding executive function, the core set of cognitive skills that helps us recall where we put our keys, keep track of appointments and adjust to traffic when driving. Dubbed the brain's CEO, it oversees our ability to weed out distraction and focus on a goal. Executive function is critical, in other words, for lifelong learning. You can't pick up a new skill, or keep old ones, without it. It's also key to a long, rewarding, independent life. "It's the last cognitive area to mature in childhood," says Bialystok, "and the first to go as we age." That process of deterioration is at the heart of one of the most pressing questions in cognitive neuroscience: how do we improve executive function and maintain it longer?

For Bialystok, the answer is rooted in a cultural priority: bilingualism. A series of studies she led over the last decade show that adult bilinguals vastly outperform their monolingual counterparts at multi-tasking-the constant practice of inhibiting one language while enabling the other keeps the executive function busier and more efficient. But the story doesn't end there. Bialystok and her team discovered a bilingualism-enhanced executive function does something astonishing: it delays the symptoms of dementia.

In a 2010 study, CT scans showed that bilingual people had to sustain twice as much brain damage before triggering signs of Alzheimer's compared to those who spoke only one language-suggesting that bilingualism afforded patients the ability to function beyond the expected im-pairment. "Bilingualism exercises more networks; it branches out, recruiting other brain areas," explains Tom Schweizer, a Toronto neuroscientist who helped lead the study. "So if you're hit with a devastating disease like Alzheimer's, your brain compensates. It reassigns what's broken-like memory function-to another area."A skill you practise provides greater benefits to executive function than a hobby, and recent evidence suggests bilingualism can stave off the onset of Alzheimer's by about five years. "That's better than any available pharmaceutical option," says Schweizer.

If learning a second language keeps our executive function in good shape, Sylvain Moreno's research reminds us that chords and scales are a language, too. A car crash at 16, and his total recovery from the resulting memory loss, left him curious about the brain's power to relearn. Today, as a scientist, Moreno has devoted the last decade to finding a link between music and executive function.

Having already used music to locate the "learning switch"-he was able to produce, in 20 days, up to a 14-point bump in IQ in preschoolers exposed to a computerized music program-Moreno wondered if the switch could be flipped for older adults.

He knew that seniors who had been professional musicians showed more rapid mental processing than those who never played an instrument. But could he replicate the same effect without requiring seniors, often saddled with motor skill problems, to spend years studying the piano or guitar? Since music stimulates the same frontal-lobe network that processed words and syntax do, Moreno had a hunch executive function could be bolstered through singing. "Your voice is itself a musical instrument," he says. "In playing it, you have to focus your attention, isolate the information that matters and act decisively."

In the first study of its kind, his team is now working with retirement homes, organizing residents into mixed choirs of 20 and training them for three months, measuring cognitive scores from their performances before and after the training. The research is ongoing, but Moreno confirms residents reap "significant" benefits to executive function. Along with better word recall, there were gains in attention span and self-control. Best of all, benefits last for up to a year after the sessions stop. "A lot of researchers still believe seniors have low brain plasticity, that you can't teach these skills," he says. "We've found the reverse."

It's the adrenalin rush and the joy of four-part harmony that led tenor Donald Blake, a 70-year-old retired political science professor, to join a seniors' choir called EnChor nearly six years ago. Aside from public concerts, EnChor visits assisted-living facilities, often performing for individuals who appear to have no awareness of what's going on around them. "But when we sing," Blake says, "sometimes you'll see a finger moving or a foot tapping. Sometimes they even join in."

Read about more "New Way of Thinking" the complete story in our January 2015 issue, now on stands.