How does learning by yourself compare with instruction when it comes to preserving brain function? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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When you have to teach yourself a task and adapt to having that task speed up, that’s one type of learning used in a study assessing different types of brain training and development of Alzheimer’s disease. Marilyn Albert, study author and Alzheimer’s disease expert at Johns Hopkins, says another group in the study did memory and reasoning tasks, while a third had no intervention.

Albert: The people in the memory and the reasoning tasks were given instruction about what to do. Those are two different kinds of learning. One we call implicit memory, the other we call explicit memory. Implicit memory uses different parts of the brain than explicit memory. Implicit memory lasts really a long time. The best example is if you're learning how to ride a bike. You're trying to balance,someone's helping you. Over time you get better. You don't consciously understand how you're getting better but you do and if you don't ride a bike for 10 years and you get back on a bike you can still do it.   :34

At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.