Does having to figure things out on your own protect your brain better than other kinds of activities? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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People who received memory and reasoning training or those who didn’t receive any brain training were more likely to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease twenty years down the road than those who did cognitive speed training, which required them to train themselves to get better at a task versus receiving instruction. That’s according to a study by Marilyn Albert, an Alzheimer’s disease expert at Johns Hopkins, and colleagues.

Albert: It's been clear for a really long time in the analysis of these data that the speed training was better. It's not what I would have guessed. From the beginning I would have guessed I think that maybe the memory training was better but it's always been clear that of all the groups of people who had the speed training did better. We think that it's for a couple of reasons. The people in the speed training group got better on the task without being given instruction they just sort of figured out how to do it over time.  :30

Such memories are very long lasting, Albert says. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.