While research has shown that birdwatching has grown in popularity over the years, a study now suggests that becoming an expert birder may even be beneficial for your brain health.
Research published in the Journal of Neuroscience last month found that the brains of study participants who were categorized as expert birders showed structural differences in areas related to attention and perception compared to the brains of participants who were not experts in birdwatching.
The Canadian study involved 58 participants split evenly into two groups. The expert group consisted of 29 people, ages 24 to 75, who were recruited from the Toronto Ornithological Club and Ontario Field Ornithologists. The novice group consisted of 29 people, ages 22 to 79, recruited from the same birding groups and other groups focused on outdoor activities, such as hiking and gardening, NBC News reported.
All the participants underwent what’s called a diffusion-weighted MRI, which assessed structural differences in their brains. The results showed that the expert group had lower “mean diffusivity,” or MD, in certain areas of their brains. Mean diffusivity is a measure of the average rate at which water molecules move through tissue, and lower MD is associated with greater tissue density.
The lower MD (and greater tissue density) in the brains of expert birdwatchers suggested increased structural complexity in certain brain areas compared to those in the novice group, according to the study. The expert group had a “potential attenuation of age-related decline” in those regions. The lower MD was also associated with higher bird identification accuracy.
The researchers also evaluated brain function in both groups using an MRI. The participants were asked to match and identify local and nonlocal bird species. The study found that an area of experts’ brains that had shown lower MD was also actively engaged “when experts judged less-familiar nonlocal (vs. local) birds.”
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Erik Wing, a lead author of the study, told NBC News that the research “gives us a window into how these regions might be important for developing the expertise in the first place.”
“We can see [birders] actually deploy those types of skills to help them identify new, unfamiliar species of birds,” he said.
Wing said the researchers chose to evaluate birders for the study because birding “combines fine-grain identification, visual search and attention to the immediate environment and sensitivity to motion, pattern detection, building these elaborate conceptual networks of different related species.”
The researchers used a bird familiarity screening test to determine whether a participant was an expert or a novice in birding, Medical News Today reported.
Wing cautioned that the study could not prove a casual link between positive brain changes and birding experience. But he told Medical News Today that “behavioral work from our group and others has shown that areas of specialized knowledge accumulated across life might be drawn on to support memory function in older adults.“
“We found that people who have spent years learning to identify birds show differences in both brain structure and brain activity — especially in regions that support attention and visual recognition,” he said elsewhere.
While this study evaluated participants based on their expertise in birding, Wing said past research suggests that brain changes have also been associated with expertise in “fields ranging from music to chess to ‘sports’ in the broadest sense (dancing to juggling).”
Dr. Emer MacSweeney, a consultant interventional neuroradiologist and CEO at Re:Cognition Health — who was not involved in the study — told the website that she believes there should be future research comparing different areas of expertise.
“While the findings resonate with a broader literature linking mentally engaging activities to healthier aging, future research should explore how different types of expertise compare and how lifestyle factors (social engagement, physical exercise, diet) interact with domain-specific training to influence brain structure and function,” she said.
Overall, when it comes to brain health, engaging in mentally stimulating activities in addition to physical ones is good for the brain in many ways. Research has shown that learning may even help older adults reduce their risk of dementia.
A study published in 2023 found that middle-aged and older adults who took adult education classes had a 19% lower risk of developing dementia within five years compared to adults who did not take classes. The participants in that study had self-reported attending adult education classes, but the frequency or type of class was not included.
“As we transition into later life, late middle age and beyond, we have to be more deliberate with making sure that we have enough intellectual stimulation and that we keep our minds healthy,” Dr. Zaldy Tan, the director of the Jona Goldrich Center for Alzheimer’s and Memory Disorders at Cedars-Sinai in California, previously told HuffPost.
