Office managers think they’re smarter than the rest of the staff and now there is medical evidence to back it up.
According to research from the UNSW, managing other people at work triggers structural changes in the brain, protecting its memory and learning centre well into old age.
Researchers have identified a link between managerial experience in a person’s working life and the integrity and larger size of an individual’s hippocampus – the area of the brain responsible for learning and memory – at the age of 80.
Dr Michael Valenzuela, leader of Regenerative Neuroscience in UNSW’s School of Psychiatry, says the findings refine our understanding of how staying mentally active promotes brain health, potentially warding off diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
The study will be presented at the Brain Sciences UNSW symposium on Thursday which is focussing on research into “brain plasticity”, or the brain’s ability to repair, rewire and regenerate itself.
The findings overturns scientific dogma that the brain is “hard-wired”.
“We found a clear relationship between the number of employees a person may have supervised or been responsible for and the size of the hippocampus,” says Dr Valenzuela.
“This could be linked to the unique mental demands of managing people, which requires continuous problem solving, short term memory and a lot of emotional intelligence, such as the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes.
“Over time this could translate into the structural brain changes we observed.”
The research comprises the doctoral work of Mr Chao Suo, supervised by Dr Valenzuela in collaboration with Scientia Professor Perminder Sachdev’s Memory and Ageing Study based in Sydney