Can being curious help you prevent dementia risk?

By Stephen Beech

A curious nature may help people ward off dementia, suggests new research.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, according to the old phrase, but it could actually help you stay sharp as you grow older, say scientists.

The study by an international team of psychologists, published in the journal PLOS One, shows that questions you ask and interest in lifelong learning might protect against Alzheimer's disease.

The researchers found that some forms of curiosity can increase well into old age - and suggests that older people who maintain curiosity and want to learn new things relevant to their interests may be able to offset or even prevent Alzheimer’s.

Conversely, those who show little curiosity and disinterest may be at risk of dementia.

The findings contradict previous research which showed that curiosity decreases with age.

Study senior author Dr. Alan Castel, of University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) said: “The psychology literature shows that oftentimes what's known as trait curiosity, or a person’s general level of curiosity, tends to decline with age.

“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.”

Dr. Castel and his colleagues wondered if the answer lay in a different type of curiosity called "state curiosity" - which is what psychologists call the kind of momentary feeling of curiosity people experience when they are asked about specific topics.

Trait curiosity, on the other hand, is a personality trait. For example, some people might not be very inquisitive by nature, being content to accept things more or less at face value (trait curiosity), but have a passionate thirst for knowledge in specific topics or hobbies (state curiosity).

The researchers said all people possess varying degrees of both trait and state curiosity.

To tease apart the two types of curiosity, the team recruited a large sample of participants between the ages of 20 and 84, with an average age of 44, to complete an online questionnaire designed to assess how curious they were in general, or their trait curiosity.

To test state curiosity, the researchers then asked the participants to guess the answers to hard trivia questions that most people were unlikely to already know.

The researchers asked participants to guess an answer, then asked participants how interested they were to know the answer before showing the correct answer.

Dr. Castel said analysis showed that the two kinds of curiosity are correlated. People who have more state curiosity also experience more trait curiosity, and vice versa.

In general, trait curiosity did decline across the adult lifespan.

But the interest ratings people gave in learning new information from trivia - a measure of state curiosity - declined in early adulthood, then increased sharply after middle age and continued upward well into old age.

Dr.Castel says the finding mirrors research that shows a dip in happiness in midlife.

The researchers suggest that one reason for the discrepancy is that, until middle age, people are usually interested in acquiring the knowledge, skills and opportunities they need to succeed at school and their jobs, pay mortgages and raise families, so a fairly high level of overall curiosity is needed.

Dr. Castel explained that those obligations also come with "stressors" that could contribute to a decline in overall happiness.

But as people age and gather knowledge, they don’t need to allocate as many resources to trait curiosity.

Dr. Castel says as their children leave home and they begin to retire, for example, people can indulge specific interests, and state curiosity increases.

He said: “Our findings fit with some of my work on selectivity theory, which is that as we get older, we don’t want to stop learning, we’re just more selective about what we want to learn.

“You see this in the context of lifelong learning: a lot of older adults will go back to take classes or pick up hobbies or engage in bird watching.

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

Dr. Castel says that his research on memory has shown that people tend to quickly forget information that doesn’t engage their curiosity.

He added: “As we get older, maybe we want to be focused on the things that are important, and we forget the things that are less relevant.

“Anecdotally, a lot of older adults I speak to say that it's important to stay curious.

"That fits with some of the research that shows that people who have early stages of dementia might show disinterest in things that they once enjoyed.”