Birding Brains: Expertise Builds Lasting Cognitive Reserve

A neuroscience study comparing 29 expert birders with 29 age- and sex-matched novices found that experts have more compact, efficient brain tissue in attention- and perception-related regions, which correlates with higher accuracy in bird identification. These structural advantages persist into older age, and older birders even remember arbitrary faces paired with birds better than beginners, suggesting that complex, multi-process skill learning builds cognitive reserve that supports broader cognition as we age.