Use It or Lose It - Extend your life through learning

Are you constantly taking courses and extending your knowledge? Does your work involve expending lots of mental energy, solving problems using new information? Do you look around at the world with curiousity, continuously trying to learn? If the answer is yes to these questions, then you're likely extending your life, or at least your life compos mentis.

There's mounting evidence that lifelong learning has a neuroprotective effect - particularly in the prevention of Alzheimer's. With advances in healthcare and medicine, we are living longer and on the horizon is a dementia epidemic, with numbers succumbing vastly increasing over the coming decades. Research shows that learning - exercising that grey muscle in your head - is just as important as sweating it out in the gym. Education, learning new languages, engaging and stimulating language, and strenuous mental effort strengthen the brain against the effect of aging.

How does this happen? During learning the neurons connect to one another and the more we learn the more expansive the web of connections. This isn't just when we learn new things but also during routine activities like work. When we repeat mental processes, existing neurons multiply, so things we learn to do get easier as we repeat them over time. We build up a store of redundant connections, so damaged ones can be retired easily - hence the protective effect of learning.

Learning is what life is all about and research like this yet again underlines the importance of equality in education. It also highlights the fundamental connection health and education, and the validity of a whole-person approach in education, science, medicine and politics.