instrument or a new language gives you a double bonus, since both have been shown to help keep your brain sharper longer. “Exercising your brain is important,” says Dr. Thomas Perls of Boston University Medical School. “Doing things that are novel and complex. Once you get good at them, and they are no longer novel, then you move on to something else. So you’re kind of doing strength training for the brain, and that has been shown to decrease your rate of memory loss, and maybe even decrease the rate at which one might develop Alzheimer’s disease.”
