How does acting improve memory in older adults?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

From the twenties to the sixties, the amount of information people can retain in working memory diminishes. Actors face a daunting task: They must memorize massive quantities of dialogue and then reproduce it accurately and spontaneously. Interviews with professional actors reveal that most do not memorize lines by rote or rehearsal. Instead, they focus on the meaning of words, an approach that produces much better recall. First, they analyze the script for the character's intentions, breaking it down into "beats"—small, goal-directed chunks of dialogue. Then they represent the role as a sequence of goals, one leading to the next. When they recall this chain of goals, lines become easier to remember. Researchers discovered that giving middle-aged and older adults nine 90-minute cognitively demanding group sessions of theater training over a month's time improved working memory capacity, word recall, and problem solving, and improvements were still evident four months after the intervention ended. The theater training required highly effortful intermodal processing, which may explain its cognitive benefits. fMRI research indicates that deeply processing verbal meanings strongly activates certain areas in the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex in middle-aged adults, restoring them to patterns close to those of young adults. These findings lend neurobiological support to the power of acting, with its challenging intermodal processing of meaning, to enhance human memory.