Birdwatching, redux

People who are into this are really, really into it.

Today’s newsletter is about neuroscience and memory. First, I’d like to ask three specific questions:

• In the original Monopoly game, which property is statistically landed on most often and why?

• What everyday habit has been shown in sleep research to quietly wreck your memory the next day even if you think you “slept enough”?

• Who was the first male player to score goals in five different FIFA World Cups?

If you immediately felt either intrigued or slightly annoyed by these questions, good. That reaction is part of the point.

Because according to a new neuroscience study published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience, being able to answer deep, detail-oriented questions like these may literally reshape the brain. It can also potentially help protect cognition as you age.

The research, led by Erik Wing of Baycrest Hospital in Toronto, focused on birdwatching — comparing expert birdwatchers with novices. At first glance, birding might sound like a niche hobby, but from a brain-science perspective, it’s almost the perfect test case.

Serious bird identification demands sustained attention, fine-grained visual discrimination, and a surprisingly heavy load on memory. Experts often learn to distinguish hundreds of species based on subtle features — beak curvature, wing bars, and tail shape — often under time pressure and imperfect viewing conditions.

What the researchers found

Using diffusion-weighted MRI scans along with behavioral testing, the researchers studied 29 expert birders (ages 24 to 75) and 29 matched novices.

Compared with beginners, the experts showed:

• Structural differences in multiple brain regions tied to attention and perception

• Functional activation in those same regions when identifying challenging birds

• Better identification accuracy that tracked with those brain differences

One of the key measures involved how water molecules diffuse through brain tissue.

In experts, diffusion was more constrained in several frontoparietal and posterior cortical regions, a signal researchers interpret as greater structural complexity.

More simply, years of focused expertise appeared to leave a physical signature in the brain. Plus, the data suggested these changes may blunt some aspects of age-related decline in the specific regions supporting expert performance.

So, is birdwatching a magic antiaging pill? No, but it does reinforce something neuroscientists have been circling for years — sustained, effortful learning changes the adult brain in durable ways.

Why birding?

All of this connects directly to earlier research from Wing and colleagues, which I wrote about here a few years back. In that work, expert birders didn’t just recognize birds better. Instead, they also organized new information differently.

When shown unfamiliar species, novices grouped birds by obvious surface features like size or color. Experts, by contrast, sorted them using deeper structural traits such as beak shape or tail configuration.

That difference turned out to matter for memory. People who processed the birds at that more detailed, expert level were also more accurate at remembering them later. One plausible explanation is that the more richly structured your knowledge base, the easier it becomes to “hang” new information onto it.

The bigger takeaway

If there’s a quiet theme running through modern memory science, it’s that memory isn’t primarily about hoarding facts. It’s about building useful mental models of the world.

As UC Davis neuroscientist Charan Ranganath put it, memory helps extract what’s important so you can navigate an uncertain future — not just replay the past. Again, caution is warranted. This new study is relatively small. It shows correlation, not proof that birdwatching itself prevents cognitive decline.

Taken together with years of related research — in music, navigation, athletics, and other domains — the direction of the evidence is getting harder to ignore.

The adult brain remains far more plastic than many people assume. So what should you actually do with this? No, you don’t need to run out and buy binoculars.

The broader implication is simpler and more encouraging. Sustained engagement in any detail-rich, mentally demanding hobby may help build the kind of knowledge scaffolding that supports stronger learning and memory over time.

Birding just happens to be a particularly elegant example, which connects back to those three questions at the top. The answers, in case you were wondering:

• The most landed-on property in Monopoly? Illinois Avenue. When players exit jail, the most common dice rolls (especially six to eight) funnel them there.

• The nighttime habit that wrecks memory? Checking your phone and sleep fragmentation. Even brief awakenings and light exposure can impair the brain’s overnight memory consolidation.

• The male player who has scored at the most FIFA World Cups? That’s Cristiano Ronaldo, with goals in 2006, 2010, 2014, 2018, and 2022.

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Other things:

• President Donald Trump’s iPhone won’t stop ringing, as his number has become the ultimate status symbol and reporters keep finding it. In the two weeks since the U.S. and Israel began military operations in Iran, Trump has done more than 30 cell phone interviews, picking up without screening his callers and conducting brief conversations with ... journalists from outlets from The New York Times to Washington Reporter. (Senator)

• A former Afghan special forces soldier who served for years alongside the U.S. military in Afghanistan for years, and who was evacuated by the U.S. with his family in in August 2021, reportedly died in custody less than 24 hours after being detained in Texas by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE said that Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, 41, a father of six, had been arrested in a “targeted enforcement action” after allegations of SNAP fraud and theft, which his surviving family denies. (NBC News)

• The National Rifle Association has a new advertising campaign: “BE READY,” urging Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights, and focusing on warnings from government officials about Iranian terror cells and lone wolf terrorists. (The Washington Times)

• Cuba’s national electric grid has collapsed, the country’s grid operator said, leaving around 10 million people without power amid a U.S.-imposed oil blockade that has crippled the island’s already obsolete generation system. (USA Today)

• Some 200,000 immigrant truck drivers began losing their commercial driver’s licenses under a new Trump administration rule that took effect Monday. The rule bars immigrants who are asylum seekers, refugees or recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, from obtaining commercial driver’s licenses. Key point: Those with valid commercial driver’s licenses will lose their driving privileges as their licenses expire, not immediately. (Wash Post)

• Pope Leo met on Monday with an investigative journalist who alleges that Opus Dei, a prominent ‌Catholic organisation with ties to right-wing politicians in the U.S. ‌and other countries, covered up sexual and financial crimes, which the group firmly denies. Opus Dei has a strong presence in Peru, ​where Leo served as ‌a missionary for decades before becoming pope. The group says its ​mission is to spread Christian teachings across the world. (USA Today)

• Many U.S. adults are skipping parenting or having fewer kids – and it’s forcing schools to close. (The Guardian)

Thanks for reading. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.