Bird-watching is a popular pastime enjoyed by more than a third of American adults. Many people love the hobby because it helps them connect with nature, sharpen their observation skills and connect with others.
This peaceful activity may come with yet another benefit: supporting brain health. According to a paper published in the March 25 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, birding might reshape the brain and could help protect it from some of the effects of aging.
Learning a new skill can cause the brain to reorganize itself as it forms new pathways and strengthens existing ones. Scientists have studied this phenomenon, known as neuroplasticity, in the brains of highly skilled experts who have devoted time and energy to mastering their craft, such as musicians and athletes.
"Our brains are very malleable," says lead author Erik Wing, a neuroscientist at York University in Canada who conducted the research while at the country's Baycrest Academy for Research and Education.
Wing and his colleagues wondered whether birding expertise might also cause changes in the brain. Becoming an expert birder requires a wide range of cognitive processes and skills, such as "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," Wing explains. "Also, you have to remember what you're seeing and compare it to these internal templates."
So, they recruited 29 expert birders and 29 novice birders, ages 22 to 79, from organizations in Canada focused on ornithology and other outdoor activities, including gardening and hiking.
While lying in an MRI scanner, each participant viewed an image of a bird for a few seconds. After a roughly ten-second delay, the individual attempted to choose the same creature from a selection of four images of similar but distinct species. They completed the exercise 72 times, using target images of 18 total bird species — 6 local and 12 non-local. As predicted, the experts were better at correctly identifying the animals.
The MRI data revealed that when the expert birders were identifying non-local birds, their brain activity increased in regions involved with tasks like object identification, visual processing, attention and working memory. A different MRI technique, which investigates brain structure, showed that those same areas were also denser and more structurally complex in the expert birders, regardless of their age, compared with the novices.
The findings hint that developing expertise in birding might reshape the brain, and it might help protect against age-related cognitive decline in regions relevant to bird identification.
While this idea about specialized skills potentially reducing the effects of brain aging has existed for a long time, "it's sort of disputed," Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Canada, who was not involved with the research, told reporters. "This paper adds another bit of evidence in favor of the concept."
The researchers emphasize the brain differences were not necessarily related to birds specifically but, rather, have more to do with birding being a specialized ability that relies on those regions of the brain.
"Birding engages a lot of these different cognitive domains, which potentially make it beneficial to a lot of different types of cognition," Wing explains. "But there is nothing inherent to the bird aspect. If you had another domain that recruited all of the same types of processes, we would expect to see sort of comparable changes there."
Still, the study has limitations. Since the scientists looked at participants' brains only during one brief period, they can't prove that birding directly caused or contributed to the brain differences between experts and novices. To do that, they'd need to follow participants for months or years to see how their brains changed over time.
"We don't know what the baseline differences are," Benjamin Katz, a cognitive aging researcher at Virginia Tech who was not involved with the research, explains. "You would need longitudinal data to make strong inferences about what birding itself is doing."
It's also possible that existing brain differences led to some participants becoming more skilled birders than others in the first place. Additionally, because the scientists recruited from outdoor organizations, the brain differences might also be explained by other factors, such as leading more active lifestyles.