Stay curious to ward off Alzheimer’s

Stay curious—it can keep you mentally sharp as you get older and could even ward off Alzheimer’s disease.

Learning new things and skills and being engaged and interested in the world are a great antidote to dementia, say researchers from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

They say there are two types of curiosity: state and trait.  State curiosity is that momentary feeling of curiosity people experience when they are asked about specific topics, while trait curiosity is how we tend to be in life.

To understand the two types, the researchers recruited a group of people between the ages of 20 and 84 to complete an online questionnaire designed to assess how curious they were in general, or their trait curiosity. Then, to test state curiosity, the researchers asked the participants to guess the answers to trivia questions that most people were unlikely to already know—and then gauge how interested they were to know the answer.

They discovered that the two kinds of curiosity are correlated: people who have more state curiosity also experience more trait curiosity. In general, trait curiosity declines as we get older, while state curiosity falls away in early adulthood before increased sharply into older age.

“A lot of older adults will go back to take classes or pick up hobbies or engage in bird watching. I think it shows that this level of curiosity, if maintained, can really keep us sharp as we age,” said Alan Castel, one of the researchers.

What do you think? Start a conversation over on the... WDDTY Community