Scientists say developing this everyday habit is key to cutting Alzheimer’s risk

Fostering curiosity and being eager to learn into old age can protect against the onset of Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests.

Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles found that older adults who remained eager to learn didn’t just succeed in keeping their minds active, they also protected their brains against Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.

The study, published in the journal PLoS One, also found that a lack of curiosity could increase the risk of cognitive decline.

The findings challenge the belief that curiosity naturally declines as we get older.

Scientists say that certain types of curiosity don’t fade with age but actually grow.

“The psychology literature shows oftentimes what’s known as trait curiosity – or a person’s general level of curiosity – tends to decline with age,” psychologist Alan Castel, a co-author of the study, said. “But we thought that was a little bit strange and went against some of the things we saw in some of the older adult participants in our experiments, who would often be very engaged and interested in learning about memory, specifically, but even other forms of trivia.”

“Trait curiosity” is a personality feature whereas “state curiosity” is what psychologists call the kind of momentary curiosity that people experience when asked about a specific topic.

Some people may not be inquisitive by nature but show a passionate thirst for knowledge about specific subjects. In the new study, scientists attempted to tease apart the two types of curiosity by recruiting a large sample of participants between the ages of 20 and 84, with an average age of 44.

Participants completed an online questionnaire designed to assess their trait curiosity. They were then asked to answer hard trivia questions that most people were unlikely to already know such as, “What was the first country to give women the right to vote?”

Researchers told the participants to guess the answer, then asked them how interested they were in knowing the correct answer before revealing it to them. They found people who had more state curiosity also experienced more trait curiosity and vice versa.

However, the interest ratings people gave in learning new information from trivia — a measure of state curiosity — appeared to change at different ages.

State curiosity seemed to decline in early adulthood, then increase sharply after middle age, and continue upward well into old age.

This may be because until middle age, people are interested in acquiring the knowledge, skills, and opportunities needed to succeed at school and jobs, pay mortgages, and raise families, tasks for which a fairly high level of overall curiosity is needed.

But as they gather this knowledge with age, they don’t need to allocate as many resources to trait curiosity. Then, as they begin to retire from work, they tend to indulge specific interests and their state curiosity increases.

“Our findings fit with some of my work on selectivity theory, which is that as we get older, we do not want to stop learning, we’re just more selective about what we want to learn,” Dr Castel said.

“I think it shows that this level of curiosity, if maintained, can really keep us sharp as we age.”