From KERA News:
Denise Park knows what it’s like to be busy.
“I designed the busyness survey [years ago] when I was a single mother with two teenage children and was a professor at the University of Michigan,” she says, in between presentations at the fifth annual Dallas Aging & Cognition Conference.
What she didn’t know was what all that sprinting from class to pick up kids to the grocery to doctors did to the brain — to memory in particular.
“There’s a remarkable absence of work on the effects of busyness on cognition,” Park says, even though everyone is always talking about how busy they are.
So, Park, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Dallas, worked with postdoctoral researcher Sara Festini on a study. They rounded up more than 300 people to find out about the connection between busyness and the brain.
“They completed a large battery of cognitive tests where they were asked to different things in the lab, like memorize words, do things like reasoning, looking at patterns, and then we also gave them this questionnaire that asked how busy they were on a daily basis,” Festini says.
