- Tension: We’ve been told that crosswords, Sudoku, and brain-training apps are the key to staying sharp after 70 — but the research doesn’t support it, and the people with the most remarkable cognitive function aren’t training at all.
- Noise: The brain-as-muscle metaphor has driven a multi-billion-dollar industry and convinced us that cognitive aging is a maintenance problem — when the real variable isn’t difficulty or discipline, but novelty, play, and the willingness to be a beginner.
- Direct Message: The sharpest minds after 70 aren’t the most disciplined — they’re the most delighted. The brain doesn’t need a workout. It needs an adventure.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Gerald, 78, lives in a cluttered house in Tucson with a workbench in the garage that looks like a crime scene committed by a particularly enthusiastic seven-year-old. There are half-built birdhouses, a lopsided ceramic bowl he’s been glazing for two weeks, scraps of balsa wood from a model airplane he’ll probably never finish, and — inexplicably — a ukulele missing one string. His daughter, Ellen, told him last Christmas that she’d bought him a subscription to one of those brain-training apps. “Dad, you need to keep your mind sharp.” He smiled, thanked her, and never opened it. He was too busy learning to juggle.
Gerald’s neurologist, who he sees annually, says his cognitive function is remarkable. Not “good for his age” — remarkable, full stop. His processing speed has barely declined in a decade. His episodic memory is sharp. He rattles off the names of his seven grandchildren, their birthdays, their schools, and their latest grievances with alarming precision.
He does not do crosswords. He does not play Sudoku. He has never touched Lumosity.
He plays.
For decades, the dominant narrative around cognitive aging has been mechanical: the brain is a muscle, so exercise it with puzzles, word games, and structured mental challenges. This metaphor has driven a multi-billion-dollar brain-training industry and launched a thousand well-meaning gifts from adult children to their aging parents. The logic feels airtight. Practice recalling words, and you’ll recall more words. Practice pattern recognition, and your patterns will sharpen.
Except the research hasn’t cooperated. A landmark study published in the BMJ found that while brain-training games can make you better at brain-training games, the skills rarely transfer to real-world cognitive function. You get faster at Sudoku. You don’t get better at remembering where you parked.
Meanwhile, something quieter and stranger has been showing up in the data. The people who maintain the sharpest cognitive function into their seventies, eighties, and beyond tend to share a characteristic that researchers initially dismissed as noise. These individuals — sometimes called “SuperAgers” — aren’t grinding through mental drills. They’re doing things that look, from the outside, a lot more like messing around.
Take Doris, 81, a retired school librarian in Portland, Oregon. Three years ago, she started taking improv comedy classes at a community center. She’s terrible at it, she says cheerfully. She forgets her scene partner’s name. She blanks on the setup. But she keeps going, twice a week, because it makes her laugh so hard she has to grip the folding chair next to her. Her doctor told her that her verbal fluency scores have actually improved since she turned 79. That’s not supposed to happen.
Or consider Hideo, 74, a former electrical engineer in San Jose who picked up watercolor painting after his wife died. He has no training. His landscapes look, by his own admission, like “someone sneezed on a napkin.” But the act of mixing pigments, choosing colors instinctively, trying to capture something he sees in his backyard oak tree — it lights him up. His kids were initially worried about him after the funeral. Now they’re trying to keep up with his energy.
What Gerald, Doris, and Hideo share isn’t discipline. It’s a specific cognitive state that researchers call novelty-seeking engagement — the willingness to do things you’re not already good at, with no pressure to perform. It’s the opposite of optimization. It’s closer to what psychologists describe as a “flow-adjacent” state: not the deep, skilled flow of a master pianist, but the bumbling, curious, slightly embarrassing flow of a beginner who doesn’t care about the result.
This distinction matters enormously. As we explored in a piece about daily habits that keep people sharp in their 70s and beyond, the common thread among cognitively resilient older adults isn’t any single activity — it’s a posture toward life. A willingness to be a beginner. To fumble. To do something purely because it’s interesting, not because it’s prescribed.
Neuroscientist Denise Park at the University of Texas at Dallas has studied this directly. Her research published in Psychological Science found that older adults who learned new, demanding skills — digital photography, quilting — showed significant improvements in episodic memory compared to those who did familiar, low-effort activities like socializing or doing word puzzles. The key variable wasn’t difficulty. It was novelty combined with sustained engagement. The brain didn’t need a workout. It needed an adventure.
There’s a cultural reason we’ve gotten this wrong for so long. We’ve inherited an industrial metaphor for aging — the body as machine, the brain as engine, maintenance as the primary goal. Keep the parts running. Oil the gears. Prevent decline. It’s a framework that treats aging as a problem to be managed, not a phase of life to be lived. And it leads people — good, well-meaning people — to treat their parents’ brains like broken cars that need regular tune-ups.
A recent piece on men who thrived after retirement touched on something adjacent: the people who did best weren’t the ones who optimized their schedules. They were the ones who built identities around curiosity rather than productivity. The same principle applies to cognitive aging. The sharpest minds at 80 aren’t the ones that trained hardest. They’re the ones that stayed playful.
Play, in the developmental psychology sense, isn’t frivolous. It’s the brain’s original learning mode — the way children build neural connections before anyone hands them a worksheet. When a toddler stacks blocks and knocks them down, they’re not wasting time. They’re building spatial reasoning, cause-and-effect understanding, and frustration tolerance simultaneously. Play is cognitively expensive in the best possible way. It demands attention, creativity, social processing, and emotional regulation all at once.
Somewhere around middle age, most people stop playing entirely. They switch to hobbies — which sounds similar but isn’t. Hobbies are often about competence. You get good at golf. You master a recipe. You optimize your garden. There’s nothing wrong with this. But competence-based activities, by definition, reduce novelty over time. You’re reinforcing existing neural pathways, not building new ones. The brain gets efficient. Efficiency, in this context, is not your friend.
This is why the birdwatching piece we published — about someone whose memory sharpened after picking up birdwatching on a therapist’s suggestion — resonated so deeply. Birdwatching isn’t a brain game. It’s an embodied, sensory, constantly novel practice that requires you to be present in a way that crosswords simply don’t. You’re outside. You’re listening. You’re scanning for movement. You’re trying to identify something you’ve never seen before. You’re a beginner every single morning.
And there’s another layer — one that’s easy to overlook. Play is almost always social, or at least socially adjacent. Doris’s improv class puts her in a room with strangers twice a week. Gerald’s woodworking projects become gifts, conversation starters, reasons for his grandkids to come over. Hideo joined a painting group that meets at a coffee shop on Saturdays. The cognitive benefits of these activities can’t be separated from their social dimensions. Loneliness is neurotoxic. Connection is neuroprotective. Play creates connection almost as a side effect.
We’ve written before about simple daily rules for staying mentally sharp, and the thread running through all of them isn’t rigor. It’s engagement. It’s the willingness to show up for something that doesn’t have a grade, a score, or a measurable outcome.
Gerald told his daughter something over the phone recently that she repeated to me, almost word for word, because it stuck with her. She’d asked him if he’d made any progress on the model airplane. He laughed. “Honey, progress isn’t the point. I’m just seeing what happens when I try.”
He’s not performing sharpness. He’s not preventing decline. He’s not training his brain. He’s just — still — curious about what happens next. And that, it turns out, is the thing the brain has always responded to most. Not the demand to perform. Not the fear of fading. Just the gentle, irreplaceable pull of wondering what would happen if you tried something you’ve never tried before, with no particular need to be good at it.
The sharpest people after 70 aren’t disciplined. They’re delighted. And delight, it turns out, is not a luxury of aging. It might be the whole mechanism.
Feature image by MART PRODUCTION on Pexels
