These Creative Hobbies Could Keep Your Brain Young, New Study Finds

It might be time to dust off those dancing shoes or pick up a paintbrush. Creative hobbies have been found to help keep your brain young, according to new research published in Nature Communications.

Using brain activity data from 1,240 participants across 13 countries, researchers created brain clocks—models that measure the difference between a person’s chronological age and the age their brain seems to be. They then applied the models to 232 people of different ages with different levels of experience in one of four creative activities: tango dancing, music (singing or playing an instrument), drawing, and playing real-time strategy video games in order to calculate their "brain age gap"—the difference between their brain age and their actual age.

Overall, the more accomplished the participants were in their chosen art forms, the lower their brain age, the researchers found. The strongest correlation was found in tango dancers, whose brains were on average seven years younger than their biological age. That could be because of the dance’s mix of complex movement sequences, coordination, and planning, Agustín Ibáñez, a neuroscientist at Adolfo Ibáñez University in Chile and one of the study's co-authors, told Nature.

But the good news is “you don’t need to be Da Vinci to have healthy effects,” Ibáñez told Nature. You also don't need to take up the tango either. Researchers broadly defined creativity as “the ability to produce ideas or solutions that are both novel and effective using one’s imagination."

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Even those who only engaged in short-term training saw benefits, the research found. “One of our key takeaways is that you do not need to be an expert to benefit from creativity. Indeed, we found that learners gained from brief video game training sessions,” Carlos Coronel, one of the study's co-authors and a postdoctoral fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute, Trinity College Dublin, said in a statement to the college.

The video game training sessions involved teaching 24 right-handed participants how to play StarCraft II, a strategy video game involving creative problem-solving. Another group, used as a control, was trained in Hearthstone, a digital collectible card game that is more rules based and requires less strategizing. Those who spent time playing StarCraft II showed slower brain aging and did better on brain tests than the control group.

The researchers also created brain maps to see which parts of the brain were most influenced by creativity and found that, in experienced participants, brain connections were notably strong in areas that involved in movement control, coordination, and rhythm.

These findings suggest that creativity, much like exercise, might be prescribed to people as a way to promote brain health. “This is not relevant only for neuroscience, but it is a cultural and policy opportunity,” Ibáñez told Trinity College Dublin. “Our societies need to reimagine healthy aging through both medical and non-medical domains, such as creativity, arts, and play.”