YHK - yet another hacker news clone

  Erik Wing, who led this research at Baycrest Academy for Research and Education in Toronto, Canada, compared MRI brain scans from bird experts to those of novices while they identified birds. He found that expert brains were wired differently in regions important for functions like attention, visual perception and visual recognition. 

I don’t consider myself a birder but I’ve got into nature photography in recent years and it’s such a joy to get out for sunrise or sunset and to come home with a special shot.

Do you know how it compares to iNaturalist? I'm not a birdwatcher, but I have iNat on my phone and sometimes use it to identify birds, and it seems to do a great job.

Perhaps we need to provide opportunities for less well off people to access nature? It might have a positive cost-benefit. And design care homes around gardens? 'forest bathing' is apparently often recommended in Japan based on studies of blood pressure and other physical indicators.

Munlochy: if you ever saw a geezer wearing an ex-army parka, builders safety boots with Opticron bins it might have been me. I don't get up there often enough to warrant the pricey stuff.

Birdwatching can still be enjoyed in most places without needing to travel far. Birds are less active in bad weather so you don’t need expensive outdoor gear, and in many places there will be freely accessible nature reserves with hides in which one can sit in shelter to watch birds.

The highest quality glass is going to get pretty expensive (camera lenses can get to the region of $20k; binoculars $4k or so) but there are also much cheaper options and often these can be quite reasonable: you don’t need to take photos of birds; a superzoom point-and-shoot can work great; more expensive binoculars make a bigger difference in low light and if you’re young (older people’s pupils won’t dilate as much so bigger objectives at a lower magnification won’t be a huge help).

I feel like mostly you’re observing that rich people spend lots of money on their hobbies and not that opening your eyes to look at birds is some expensive exclusionary activity.

They basically installed a bunch of bird feeders outside nursing homes to see if watching birds improves the health of the elderly people. The researchers concluded that it did:

    Nursing home staff were the first to see the difference the birds made. "For weeks, they haven't seen a smile on [a resident's] face, and then they see the smile," Kals says.
    Some of the memory and concentration improvements are evident after just three to four weeks, Kals says.

https://www.lbv.de/umweltbildung/fuer-seniorenheime/ausstatt...

The challenge however is, is it that those who engage in such hobbies have decline slowed. Or are they able to engage in those hobbies due to not declining.

It's not possible to answer clearly without some randomisation and control which is basically impossible.

Still, it's reasonable inference that hobbies and work maintain cognitive capabilities.