Your friends may gift you mental well-being

Maintaining strong social ties could help preserve memory and it also slows down brain ageing, as per a study

Astrong social network of friends and family may help preserve memory and protect it from the ill effects of ageing, a study in mice suggests. Scientists from the Ohio State University in the US found that mice housed in groups had better memories and healthier brains than animals that lived in pairs.

The discovery bolsters a body of research in humans and animals that supports the role of social connections in preserving the mind and improving quality of life, said Elizabeth Kirby, an assistant professor at Ohio State.

“Our research suggests that merely having a larger social network can positively influence the ageing brain,” said Kirby, lead researcher of the study published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience.

“We know that in humans there’s a strong correlation between cognitive health and social connections, but we don’t know if it is having a group of friends that’s protecting people or if it’s that people with declining brain health withdraw from their human connections,” Kirby said.

This study was designed to answer that hard-to-crack question with an animal model. Some mice lived in pairs, which Kirby refers to as the “old-couple model.” Others were housed for three months with six other roommates, a scenario that allows for “pretty complex interactions.” The mice were 15 months to 18 months old during the experiment — a time of significant natural memory decline in the rodent lifespan.

In tests of memory, the group-housed mice fared better. One test challenged the mice to recognise that a toy, such as a plastic car, had moved to a new location. A mouse with good brain health will gravitate toward the novelty of something that has been relocated.

“With the pair-housed mice, they had no idea that the object had moved. The grouphoused mice were much better at remembering what they’d seen before and went to the toy in a new location, ignoring another toy that had not moved,” Kirby said.

“And that tells us that they’re using the hippocampus, an area of the brain that is really important for good memory function,” she said. In humans, mice and many other animals, brain function in the hippocampus markedly declines with age, even in the absence of dementia. Exercise and social ties are known to preserve memory in this region in people, Kirby said.