🧠 Creativity: Blueprint for Slower Aging

Please see the corresponding Substack episode

We’ve been thinking about aging all wrong.

Not the getting older part—that’s inevitable, written into our cells like a contract we never signed. But the part about what happens inside our heads while the calendar pages turn. We’ve accepted, with a kind of weary resignation, that our brains will slow down, that neurons will fire less reliably, that the brilliant machinery of thought will gradually dim like a bulb running out of power.

What if I told you that’s negotiable?

Creative experiences and brain clocks

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Transcript

0:25

Welcome to the deep dive. Today we're taking a really fascinating look inside your own head. We're exploring how you might actually be able to, well, reset your brain's biological clock. Yeah, it's a pretty exciting idea. Forget the number on your driver's license. We mean your biological brain age. It's like, a quantifiable measure of how fast your brain is really aging on the inside. And our sources for this deep dive, they're based on this really comprehensive study. We're talking nearly 1,500 people. They used advanced brain imaging, machine learning, all to track the biological effects of getting creative. Right. Some pretty sophisticated methods. So our mission today is to unpack the science. Does getting involved in creative stuff, painting, music, dance, even complex video games, does it actually slow down brain aging? Especially in those really critical brain areas. Okay, so to really get into this, we need to start with the core metric they used. It's called the brain age gap or bag. Bag. got it essentially it's the difference between the age their computer models predict your brain is based on its activity and you know your actual age in years yeah okay so if the model says your brain looks older than you are chronologically that's a positive bag and that suggests accelerated aging it's Bag. often linked to well higher risks for certain diseases unhealthy lifestyle Things like that. So a positive bag isn't just like normal wear and tear. It's more of a warning sign, a vulnerability. factors Exactly. That's a good way to put it. It's a significant biological marker. So conversely, what this research was really chasing is a negative bag. Which means? That means your brain is aging slower than your calendar age. It suggests your brain health is robust, maybe even protective. So the big question was, can creative activities consistently lead to these beneficial negative bags? And if so, how big is that protective boost? And the tech they use to measure this, MEG data, that sounds pretty complex. It is, yeah. It stands for magnetoencephalography and electroencephalography. Basically fancy tools to measure the tiny electrical currents and magnetic fields your brain produces in real time. So you can see the brain actually working. Precisely. It lets researchers map out the brain's functional connectivity, like how different parts are communicating. Then they fed all that data into machine learning models to predict biological age very accurately. Okay, that makes sense. So let's dig into the evidence. The study design itself seems clever. They didn't just look at one type of creativity, right? They had two parts. That's right. They wanted to see if the effect held up across different activities and timescales. So first, the expertise study. They compared people with years, sometimes decades, of experience in four specific creative fields against people with no expertise. Like pros versus novices. Exactly. And second, the learning study. They took novices and actually tracked their brain changes before and after some pretty intensive but short-term training. Gotcha. And the headline finding. Well, this is the really compelling part. They found a strong domain-independent protective effect. Domain-independent. Meaning it didn't really matter what the creative activity was, whether it was complex movement, visual art, music, or strategic thinking. The experts in all these areas showed significantly delayed brain aging compared to the control group. Yeah. Their brains looked younger. Wow. Okay, now I want the numbers. How much younger are we talking? They're pretty striking. Let's start with tango dancers. Tango. Okay. Masters of incredibly complex coordination, improvisation, rhythm, spatial awareness, they showed the biggest delay. The delta bag, that's the average difference compared to non-experts, was about negative 7.1 years. Whoa, hold on. Seven years. Their brains biologically measured seven years younger on average. That's what the data indicates. Seven years. It has a huge effect. The thinking is that the intense demands of tango constantly adapting to a partner, the music, the space, it forces incredible integration between sensory and motor system. That's incredible. Okay, was it just tango or did other arts show this too? Nope, not just tango. Visual artists, people focused on visual details, imagination, executing complex ideas. Visually, they showed a delay of around negative 6.2 years. Still really significant. Definitely. And musicians, this included instrumentalists and singers, people with intense auditory and motor training. They came in around negative 5.4 years younger biologically. Okay. Musicians, artists, dancers. Yeah. Definitely. That kind of makes intuitive sense. But then there's the one that I admit made me pause. Video game players. Ah, yes. the StarCraft II players. Right. Highly skilled real-time strategy gamers. They showed a delay, too. They did. About negative 4.1 years. Okay, negative 4 years is still substantial. Yes. But are we really saying playing StarCraft has a similar kind of protective brain effect as mastering tango? That seems like a stretch. Well, that's the power of that domain-independent finding. On the surface, they look totally different, right? Physical movement versus clicking a mouse and staring at a screen. Yeah. But think about the cognitive demands of high-level StarCraft. It's incredibly fast-paced decision-making, predicting what your opponent will do, managing resources, multitasking, constant attention switching, massive working memory load. Okay. When you put it like that. The sources argue these activities, despite looking different, share this core requirement. You have to constantly adapt and refine complex cognitive and sometimes motor skills. You're always pushing your brain to be more efficient and faster. So it's less about the what and more about the how. The active learning, the sustained challenge, the skill acquisition, that's what's driving the benefit. That seems to be the key takeaway. It suggests this commitment to mastering something creative or complex acts like a real biological shield for you. for the brain. Okay, that leads perfectly into the next question. Yeah. Scalability. Do you need to dedicate your life to Tango, like 20 years, to get this benefit? Or can someone starting, say, a painting class next week actually see a difference? Great question. And the research tackled this directly by comparing the long-term experts with the short-term learners. Well, as you'd probably guess, the effects in the long-term experts, those musicians, dancers, artists with years under their belts were consistently larger. Moderate to large effect sizes, statistically speaking. Makes sense. More practice, bigger benefit. But, and this is maybe the most exciting part for, well, everyone listening. The short-term learning study showed something really motivating. They took people who were complete novices at Spark Rep 2. They gave them just 30 hours of focused training. That's it. 30 hours? Like less than a standard work week? Exactly. And after just those 30 hours, they showed a significant measurable delay in brain aging. their average delta bag was about negative 3.06 years. Wait, seriously, 30 hours of learning a complex game can make your brain biologically three years younger? That return on investment is unbelievable. It is pretty remarkable, and it really changes how we might think about brain health maintenance, doesn't it? It's not necessarily about decades of commitment, though that helps. But there has to be a catch, right? Just playing casually doesn't do it. Yeah, right. There's a crucial point the sources emphasize. skill level and improvement matter. It's not just about passive exposure. It's about actively getting better. How did they measure that? Okay, so in the long-term study with the experts, they found a clear pattern. The more skilled someone was judged by things like years of instruction, performance levels, that sort of thing, the bigger their negative bag. So higher skill correlated with a younger brain age. Okay. And they saw the same thing in the short-term learner. For the StarCraft players, they measured performance using something called actions per minute, or APM. It's a standard metric in strategy games for how quickly and efficiently you're executing commands. Ah, so like a speed and efficiency score. Exactly. And the participants who showed the biggest improvement in their APM after those 30 hours, they also showed the biggest reduction in their brain age gap. So it really hammers home that point. The benefit comes from the active challenge, the striving, the measurable improvement, not just showing up. Precisely. It's the engagement and the learning process itself that seems to be driving the biological change. This is fascinating. So we see the effect. We see it scales with expertise and even short term learning if you're improving. But where in the brain is this happening? Where's the magic occurring? They were able to pinpoint this too. The delayed aging effect, this protective benefit, Mm hmm. was primarily seen in the frontoparietal hubs of the brain. Frontoparietal hubs. Why is that area significant? Is it just random or? Oh, far from random. The frontoparietal network is basically, think of it as the brain's executive control center. It handles the high level stuff, Planning, decision making, working memory, focusing your attention. The stuff that really defines our thinking. Exactly. And here's the crucial part. These honto parietal regions are known to be among the most vulnerable to age-related decline. They're often the first areas to show wear and tear as we get older. Ah, okay. So the creative activities are specifically strengthening the areas most at risk. That's what it looks like. These experiences seem to bolster the functional connectivity, the communication efficiency within these exact vulnerable hubs, like reinforcing the walls where they need it most. They also looked at what cognitive functions were linked to these brain changes, right? Using something called Neurosynth. Yes. Neurosynth is a tool that maps brain activity patterns to known cognitive processes. based on thousands of studies, and they found interesting differences between the experts and the learners. Like what? For the long-term experts, the brain changes, the increased connectivity, were linked to functions like motor control, rhythm coordination, imagery, and visual salience. Things you'd associate with highly practiced, refined skills Deeply ingrained abilities Right, whereas for the short-term learners The changes were more about the initial stages of skill acquisition Things like attention, visual perception, object recognition And focusing visual attention It reflects that initial effort of just figuring out the new complex information So learners are building the foundation attention perception While experts are refining the complex execution That seems to be a good interpretation Yeah. OK, so putting it all together, how does the brain's overall communication network actually change? Are these activities just making existing connections stronger or is it more like building new roads? It seems to be a bit of both, leading to a more efficient and robust network overall. They use complex modeling techniques like graph theory to analyze the network structure. We found what? Two key changes. First, an increase in local efficiency. Local efficiency. Think of it like improving communication within specialized brain regions or local clusters. It means faster, more efficient processing of specific types of information within those neighborhoods. Both the experts and the short-term learners showed this increase. So better performance within specialized teams. basically. That's a good analogy. But the second change was mainly seen in the long term experts. That was increased global coupling. Global coupling. So connecting the different neighborhoods. Exactly. It reflects the overall strength of communication between distant brain regions. It's like the brain structural bandwidth, its ability to integrate information across the entire system. If local efficiency is upgrading the department's internal comms, global coupling is like building new high-speed fiber optic cables connecting all the departments across the country. Ah, okay. And that strengthening of the whole network, the big picture connections, that really only came with long-term practice. That's what the data suggested. It points to a deeper, more consolidated structural change in the brain that likely takes years of sustained practice to build. The short-term learners boosted their local processing but hadn't yet laid down those superhighways across the brain. That really paints a clear picture. So the big takeaway here seems undeniable. Engaging in these creative experiences, whether it's art, music, dance, complex gaming, it's genuinely associated with slowing down biological brain aging. Yes, the evidence points strongly in that direction. And it's tied to these core mechanisms of brain plasticity, making communication networks more efficient, both locally and with time, globally, especially in those critical frontoparietal areas that are so vulnerable as we age. It provides solid biological backing for something maybe we felt intuitively, that pushing ourselves to learn and master complex skills is fundamentally good for our brains. It's not just a nice-to-have, it seems to be a biological necessity for long-term resilience. Right. And the sources end with this really thought-provoking point about policy. They say these findings could inform future public policies to improve health and well-being through creativity and the arts. Because if this benefit is real, if it's quantifiable, biological, and applies across different activities, well, that changes the game for things like arts funding, education, maybe even public health initiatives. It certainly raises the question. So here's something for you to think about. If we now have clear evidence that creative skill-building activities can literally make brains biologically younger and more resilient, potentially warding off decline, what should we do about it? What kinds of new public health programs or school policies could we design to give everyone access to that, that brain clock reset? Definitely some food for thought next time you're thinking about picking up a new skill or diving back into an old creative passion. You're not just having fun. You might actually be building a younger brain.