How New Learning Boosts Psychological Wellbeing
Happy New Year!
Have you come up with a New Year’s Resolution? I hope so, because it means you’ll be starting the New Year in a way that will enhance your self-esteem.
Setting yourself a new and appealing challenge will benefit all aspects of psychological wellbeing. Here’s how:
When you learn a new skill, your behavioural and cognitive skill sets grow. That will mean you’re better able to face up to new challenges and solve tricky problems.
When you reach your goal, the sense of accomplishment and self-pride adds to your emotional wellbeing. Remember how great you felt when you rode a bike or swam across a pool for the first time?
And your additional interest will also enhance social wellbeing. For example, you’ll meet new friends if you join a running club or dog training class, or if you sign up for a photography course.
Last but not least, did you know that new learning can even increase your brain capacity? If that surprises you, you’re not alone.
Until only about 15 years ago, it was assumed that once we’re in our mid-twenties, our brain has reached maximum capacity, and all that’s left is to work hard to hold onto what we already have or watch it decline.
Happily, in 1997, Eleanor Maguire and her colleagues at University College London challenged that notion when they turned their attention to London taxi drivers.
In order to qualify to drive a taxi in London, an individual has to learn something called ‘The Knowledge’. This require them to memorise the location of literally thousands of routes and points of interest within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross. Maguire wondered how this was possible. Could the brains of those who succeed be different?
To find out, she recruited a number of taxi drivers who agreed to have a brain scan. Sure enough, their brains were different. An area involved in learning and memory—particularly spatial memory—called the posterior hippocampus, was bigger in volume for taxi drivers than it was in individuals who’d not learned The Knowledge.
But Maguire didn’t stop there. Through a series of further experiments, she realised that it wasn’t that taxi drivers already have a larger posterior hippocampus and so are able to learn The Knowledge more easily than others, but rather that taking the time and effort to learn all those routes actually changed their brain structure!
So please, this New Year, set yourself something truly challenging. If you achieve it, it really will make your life better in so many ways.
And…you can do this whatever your age. Yes, it’s true: you really can teach an old dog new tricks! That’s why in our second posts this month, Caroline and I are going to explain how, whether you’re turning your attention to your own self-improvement or you’d like to teach your dog a new skill, anyone can do this—at any age.
Until then, usher in the New Year with positive intentions!
Warm wishes,
Linda