The skills you develop from being a birdwatcher are perfectly suited to boosting your brain, according to Canadian scientists from Baycrest Hospital in Toronto.
Their new study reveals that having a keen eye, being able to pay attention for long time periods and having a strong memory are all associated with more years behind the binoculars. And, crucially, honing these skills could literally reorganise the structure of your brain and improve cognition.
Published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the researchers compared the brain structures of 29 expert birders with 29 beginners. The two groups were gender-balanced and matched in age.
Scans revealed that the parts of the brain associated with attention and perception were more compact in the expert birders, and these structural changes made them better at identifying birds.
Specifically, the water molecules in these brain regions were able to move more freely, seeming to boost their identification abilities, making them better at detecting less familiar or less local birds.
Learning of any kind (such as a new instrument or language) is great for your brain, but the research argues that birding skills are particularly good because of their complexity.
“What’s interesting about this work is that birdwatching places sustained demands on your perception, attention and memory, so you can never fully run on autopilot,” Prof Martin Sliwinski told BBC Science Focus. Sliwinski, who was not involved in the study, is the director of the Center for Healthy Aging at Penn State, in the US.
“If cognitively stimulating activities are going to have cognitive benefits, they likely need to stay challenging, which birdwatching does,” he continued.
“Even expert birders can’t rely on automatic responses because environments and cues continually change, often under uncertainty and time pressure.”
What’s more, the researchers think these skills, and the structural changes they cause, could boost cognition into older age. That’s because the older birders in the study had better facial recognition than beginners, indicating improved information recall.
Yet Sliwinski cautioned that there may be some other factors at play, since people “with stronger cognitive abilities and an interest in birds may be more likely to take up birding, persist in it and become experts.”
In other words, it may not be that birdwatching sharpens the brain, but that people with certain cognitive strengths are naturally drawn to it.
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