“It’s been known for a while that neurons in the brain can improve, that you can increase the number of synapses even in old age,” says lead study author G. John Andersen, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside. “What’s unique here is that until now, there hasn’t been much one can do behaviorally to improve how the brain processes information.” MORE: 6 Foods For Seriously Sharp Eyesight Andersen and his team took older and younger subjects—college students and seniors in their early 70s—and put them through a series of visual training sessions. After a baseline assessment of their vision, participants were asked to determine whether striped images on a computer screen were rotating clockwise or counterclockwise. The stimuli was challenging them for them to see, Andersen explains, because it had low contrast—the part of our vision that takes the biggest hit over time—as well as visual noise, like snow on a TV channel with no signal. The result: dramatic improvements among the older set. “From just five days of training, they were able to see low-contrast targets as well as untrained 20-year-olds,” Andersen says. And in a surprising result, their close-up vision improved as well. Post training, the seniors could not only make out edges much better, but they could also correctly identify more letters on an alphabet chart. The training also improved the college students’ vision but their gains weren’t as dramatic, mostly because there wasn’t as much room for improvement. MORE: 10 Things Your Eyes Say About You “When you do this type of behavioral training in older adults, their brain structure actually changes,” says Andersen, who has seen MRI-based evidence of increases in white matter underneath the visual processing center. While many different factors may be at play, the end result is that there’s more neuronal signaling going on. “It’s almost like the brain is rewiring itself,” Andersen says. “This finding is exciting because it shows that you can get improvements in acuity even in old age.” (The findings don’t apply to people with age-related eye diseases such as glaucoma or macular degeneration.) So how can you get results? Andersen would love to eventually see an app or a website that approximates this training for people at home, but it’s a challenge to set up, he explains, because the stimuli must be tailored to each individual. “It’s like weight lifting: If you can bench press 50 pounds and you go to the gym and your trainer tells you to lift only 2 pounds, you won’t improve,” Andersen says. “What changes your strength is when you train according to your ability.” Until then, we can all make the one move that has clearly been shown to slow all kinds of aging processes in the body—aerobic exercise. “It not only improves cognitive function but also increases white matter,” Andersen says. MORE: 8 Weird Reasons Your Vision’s Changing
