Therapies: Bench Presses for Older People's Brains

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By ERIC NAGOURNEY

NY Times Teaching people memorization strategies that can encourage the brain to work more effectively may help reduce the memory loss that often accompanies aging, researchers say.

Writing in the current issue of Neuron, researchers said that volunteers given memorization tips somewhat like those a sales agent uses to remember customers' names could be seen using their brains differently on functional magnetic resonance imaging scans.

The lead author, Dr. Randy Buckner of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, said the technique seemed to help people who, as they aged, became less adept at calling the appropriate parts of their brains into action when an intellectual challenge arose.

The problem, the authors said, could be seen when M.R.I. exams were given to 62 volunteers, some in their 20's and the rest in their 70's and 80's, who were asked to memorize words. "The older adults did not recruit the critical frontal regions as much as the younger adults," Dr. Buckner said.

But when the elderly volunteers were told not just to memorize a word but to make an association with it - deciding, for example, whether it was abstract or concrete - their memories improved, and the M.R.I. showed different parts of the brain at work.