Why Playing Bingo is Good for You
Feeling sluggish, weak,and just blah all over? You just might be needing something to perk your neurons. Some people say that you can do a lot of things to keep your mind healthy and sharp, like regularly exercising, listening to classical music, including fish oils in your diet, and a host of other things that have or have not been scientifically proven to actually work.
If you like to play bingo regularly, then you're in luck. The effects of bingo on our mental agility has been looked at many times and results have shown that the game does help to keep the mind in shape, especially if you start playing the game when you're younger.
This does not mean that you cannot start playing the game now. Bingo can do a lot for your mental and physical reflexes. Tests have shown that bingo players scored better on tests that measures mental speed, recall , and the ability to pick up information from the world around them.
Julie Winstone has been studying the effects of bingo on people for some time and she gave a report about her research in front of the Annual Conference of the Psychologists Special Interest Group in Older People held in Winchester. In her study of people between the ages of 18-40 and 60-82, with groups that played and did not play bingo, she found that those who played the game fared better in certain mental tasks, and that older players played better than younger ones in certain aspects of the game. Older players were better at accuracy, while the younger players did better when it came to speed.
She concluded that playing games such as bingo, games that require both mental and physical agility, just might be helpful in delaying the onset of the decline of cognitive abilities, like the ability to identify patterns, mental speed and accuracy. She acknowledged that more studies are needed to be done to determine if the skills that are maintained or improved when playing the game are transferred to other areas of mental ability.
The socialization that comes with playing the game helps too. People who regularly play the game in bingo halls get to meet friends and new people on a regular basis, decreasing the chances of loneliness and depression. Bingo is a way for older people to feel connected and to maintain a stable circle of friends.So aside from keeping the mind sharp, bingo also is also apparently a great way to keep the heart healthy!