A recent study of people with diabetes found that chuckling could reduce age-related
memory loss.
I’m all for it! Life is short, after all, and if can’t have
a bring-you-to-tears chuckling session now and again, well, what’s it all for?
Could
You Pass A Memory Test ?
The study, presented at San Diego’s Experimental Biology
meeting, involved 20 healthy individuals aged 66 to 72. Researchers at Loma
Linda University in California had one group of test subjects sit quietly in a
room and had the other, which included both people with diabetes and those
without, watch a short comedy video.
Immediately after, they tested the patients’ memory and
found that those who had watched the funny video performed better on all of its
measures – memory recall, learning ability and visual recognition. The
researchers found that memory recall and learning ability were up by about 40
percent in the group that watched the funny video, compared to 20 percent for
the group that watched nothing.
The study subjects also showed lower levels of cortisol, a
stress hormone known to negatively impact brain neurons, after watching the
video. Measured at the start and end of the test via saliva samples, the
cortisol levels decreased in the humor group for those both with and without
diabetes, but stayed constant in the control group.
The subject group with diabetes showed both the greatest
improvements in the memory test and the greatest reductions in cortisol levels
after watching the comedy video. So watching those crazy YouTube videos your
friends and family email you might do you and your brain a world of good.
Stress
can Harm Your Body and Your Brain
Too much stress is hard on your body, we all know that. But
recent research has shown that stressful emotions could make the brain more
susceptible to mental illness and previous studies have shown that stress
increases cortisol production. This lends credit to the idea that stress can
damage memory and the ability to learn in older people.
The recent California study shows that a person’s memory
performance should improve as they encounter less stress, co-author Dr. Lee
Burk told Medical News Today. “Humor reduces detrimental stress hormones like
cortisol that decrease memory hippocampal neurons, lowers your blood pressure,
and increases blood flow and your mood state,” Burk explained. All good!
Chuckling causes your body to release more endorphins and
dopamine to the brain, which makes us feel good and improves memory by
increasing gamma wave band frequency, he said.
The research could be used to improve rehabilitation and
wellness programs for the elderly. Cognitive abilities like learning and memory
recall get more difficult as we age, but are essential for our quality of life.
Burk says, “Although older adults have age-related memory deficits,
complementary, enjoyable and beneficial humor therapies need to be implemented
for these individuals.”
ABC News recently reported that chuckling also has the
potential to improve immune function and change brain wave activity toward the
“gamma frequency” that improves memory and recall. However, the study group was
small, which limits the degree to which the results can be applied to the
population as a whole.
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