ACTOR:Hi...um, I'm- I'm, um, I'm- I'm- looking for a-a John S-Sydney Woods.
You’re uh...
you’re speaking with him.
TONY: Well, for years we’ve been studying actor’s expertise, the nature of cognitive
processes
that professional actors use
and we’ve done many different types of studies including for
enhancing healthy cognitive aging with very elderly people.
HELGA: Currently, there are a
lot of researchers that have shown that mentally stimulating and
maybe novel, unfamiliar activities
benefit older adults in terms of their cognitive functioning.
But so far it’s really been difficult to tease out
what are exactly those activities
that would be most beneficial.
ACTOR: My Dad.
First try, first time. Thirty years later. I didn’t even hear what he said next. My name is Michael
Fausberg and I’m your son.
TONY: We have a lot of behavioral evidence based on testing the before and after
that acting does improve cognitive functioning
when people are even given brief courses in acting. We’re not talking about professional
actors.
Even brief coursing in acting seems to help.
We took one group of students and told them to learn some material,the most
efficient way they could and then we took another group of students and
gave them five minutes in instruction and acting technique and say, ‘don’t try
to learn this, nothing to do with learning, just mean what you’re saying
as you’re saying it.’ And we found that the people who used an actor’s way of
approaching
text learned more than students who were deliberately memorizing the same material.
ACTOR: And my body just thank I braced myself with my left hand while I continued to hold the phone with my right. I felt very warm.
I don’t actually think I have a very good memory, to be honest with you. I mean I can’t remember like a lot of other
things. Like I’m a list person; I have to make lists to remember what I have to do, but I
can go up on stage and I
do a one-man show for an hour and twenty minutes on stage, constantly talking and I have no
problem remembering that.
Descendents of the Woods and Robinsons family from Jefferson City in Columbia,
Missouri had been had living in the past forty years
in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
HELGA: There’s actually evidence
that the acting process makes the brain more active and that, that is
what causes the older adults to show improvement when they have been
through an acting course or course in theater.
TONY: Acting involves not just one area, so many things.
Cognitive interventions are just thinking, but necessarily acting involves
thinking, feeling, and doing. Physiology is very much involved in gesture, in movement,
in body language.
HELGA: Each one of these components would be activating a different
part of the brain, so it would be your language areas, then it would be your motor area, then it would be your
emotional area
and so there will be
three totally different areas that should show stimulation.
TONY: So we’d love to identify those areas in the brain that seem to be needing
that effect. This is an old adage: stage time is always now.
That’s the point. You have to do it in the moment. Instantly. You have to engage all
these brain areas simultaneously
and it’s an active processing, what one psychologist calls
calls mindfulness; it’s being fully present in the moment and it seems to be a
tremendously healthy thing so what we’re trying to do is to
design interventions for both students and elderly
and all the way along the life cycle to get to that.