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Cognitive Aging: Work helps our brain

A new paper by SISSA and University of Padua on a large sample of the Italian population shows that occupation influences the course of cognitive decline

Invecchiamento cognitivo lavoro Cognitive Aging Work — Photo credits Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Trieste, 9 Dec 2021 – A recent study shows that work plays an active role in keeping our brains healthy. “We have demonstrated the role of working activity on cognitive performance”. Professor Raffaella Rumiati says. She is cognitive neuroscientist at SISSA and author of the paper Protective factor for Subjective Cognitive Decline Individuals: Trajectories and change in a longitudinal study with Italian seniors, recently published in the European Journal of Neurology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ene.15183

“Many studies have been focused on the factors influencing our brain aging and differences in cognitive decline have been often observed in association with education or other related to quality of life. From our analysis it emerges that the type of work activity also contributes to the differences in normal and pathological cognitive aging”.

The analysis: resistant and declining brains

The research, carried out by a team of scientists from the University of Padua (Dip. FISPPA), SISSA – Scuola Internazionale di Studi Superiori Avanzati and IRCSS San Camillo Hospital in Venice, quantified the relative contribution of demographic factors (age and sex), comorbidity, education and occupation to the so-called cognitive reserve, that is brain’s resistance to a damage caused by illness or aging. Participants were assessed with a series of neuropsychological tests and subsequently divided into three types of profiles based on the results: subjects at risk of cognitive decline, subjects with mild decline and subjects with severe decline.

The tests were repeated twice a few years apart. Depending on whether they maintained or worsened their profile based on their initial performance, participants were classified as “resistant” or “declining”.

Education and occupation to stay young

The analysis surprisingly shows that occupation is a good predictor of participants’ performance in addition to age and education, two factors that have been already studied.

Professor Sara Mondini of the University of Padua says:

“We confirmed that education protect people from the risk of cognitive decline and that these individuals had held more complex occupations than the individuals of the other two groups, the subjects with mild and advanced cognitive decline. Furthermore, the study showed how “resistant” group has on average higher levels of education and more complex jobs than the “declining” group.”

The results demonstrate benefits of cognitive mobilization promoted by lifelong learning and that social connection, ongoing sense of purpose and ability to function independently largely affect cognitive health and general well-being along the trajectories of aging.

Press release from the University of Padua and SISSA – Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati.

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According to new research, black holes could be like a hologram, where all the information is amassed in a two-dimensional surface able to reproduce a three-dimensional image. The study which demonstrates it, and which unites two discordant theories, has recently been published in Physical Review X

black holes hologram — What researchers have done is apply the theory of the holographic principle to black holes. In this way, their mysterious thermodynamic properties have become more understandable: focusing on predicting that these bodies have a great entropy and observing them in terms of quantum mechanics, you can describe them just like a hologram: they have two dimensions, in which gravity disappears, but they reproduce an object in three dimensions. Credits: Gerd Altmann for Pixabay

We can all picture that incredible image of a black hole that travelled around the world about a year ago. Yet, according to new research by SISSA, ICTP and INFN, black holes could be like a hologram, where all the information is amassed in a two-dimensional surface able to reproduce a three-dimensional image. In this way, these cosmic bodies, as affirmed by quantum theories, could be incredibly complex and concentrate an enormous amount of information inside themselves, as the largest hard disk that exists in nature, in two dimensions.

This idea aligns with Einstein’s theory of relativity, which describes black holes as three dimensional, simple, spherical, and smooth, as they appear in that famous image. In short, black holes “appear” as three dimensional, just like holograms. The study which demonstrates it, and which unites two discordant theories, has recently been published in .

The mystery of black holes

For scientists, black holes are a big question mark for many reasons. They are, for example, excellent representatives of the great difficulties of theoretical physics in putting together the principles of Einstein’s general theory of relativity with those of quantum physics when it comes to gravity. According to the first theory, they would be simple bodies without information. According to the other, as claimed by Jacob Bekenstein and Stephen Hawking, they would be “the most complex existing systems” because they would be characterised by an enormous “entropy”, which measures the complexity of a system, and consequently would have a lot of information inside them.

The holographic principle applied to black holes

To study black holes, the two authors of the research, Francesco Benini (SISSA Professor, ICTP scientific consultant and INFN researcher) and Paolo Milan (SISSA and INFN researcher), used an idea almost 30 years old, but still surprising, called the “holographic principle”. The researchers say: “This revolutionary and somewhat counterintuitive principle proposes that the behavior of gravity in a given region of space can alternatively be described in terms of a different system, which lives only along the edge of that region and therefore in a one less dimension. And, more importantly, in this alternative description (called holographic) gravity does not appear explicitly. In other words, the holographic principle allows us to describe gravity using a language that does not contain gravity, thus avoiding friction with quantum mechanics”.

What Benini and Milan have done “is apply the theory of the holographic principle to black holes. In this way, their mysterious thermodynamic properties have become more understandable: focusing on predicting that these bodies have a great entropy and observing them in terms of quantum mechanics, you can describe them just like a hologram: they have two dimensions, in which gravity disappears, but they reproduce an object in three dimensions”.

From theory to observation

“This study,” explain the two scientists, “is only the first step towards a deeper understanding of these cosmic bodies and of the properties that characterise them when quantum mechanics crosses with general relativity. Everything is more important now at a time when observations in astrophysics are experiencing an incredible development. Just think of the observation of gravitational waves from the fusion of black holes result of the collaboration between LIGO and Virgo or, indeed, that of the black hole made by the Event Horizon Telescope that produced this extraordinary image. In the near future, we may be able to test our theoretical predictions regarding quantum gravity, such as those made in this study, by observation. And this, from a scientific point of view, would be something absolutely exceptional”.

Press release from the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati

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