Many people live in fear of aging, but aging is not just a physical reality, it can also be a mental condition. Now, a study on the matter reveals a new way of looking at the role of technology to aging.
The study by Valeria Bordone found out that senior citizens who use computers and mobile phones display a more desirable mental age for people who are pushing 50 and above.
At the heart of this study is the Flynn effect, an observation from the 1930s that states that over time, the world's improved access to education, nutrition, and healthcare have compounding effects to the improvement of the cognitive abilities of people.
"We know that IQ (intelligence quotient) has been increasing for many decades," Bordone told Quartz in reference to the Flynn effect.
But Bordone did not stop on IQ. Her study tested the respondents in many more cognitive areas. She used a simple digit test for checking raw cognitive functions, animal-naming test for verbal fluency, and recall test for checking fluid intelligence. Across the skills her study measured, respondents near to the age of 60 had better scores in 2012 than those who were tested in 2006. The results suggest that there was a considerable improvement in cognition.
To put better perspective on the comparison of the cognitive abilities relative to the age of the respondents she used in her study, Bordone stated, "In many cases 52-year-olds from 2006 had the same score as 60-year-olds from 2012. The levels of education hadn't changed much among these two populations, but we could see that their use of computers and mobile phones had changed quite a bit."
The eight years of mental age difference seen here is encouraging and may launch other studies along the same line.
