That Guy From Those Nintendo Brain Age Games Says Driving Stick Can Help Prevent Dementia

Remember those Brain Age games Nintendo sold, presumably to give older people a justification to buy a Nintendo DS if they were too insecure to say they just really liked playing Kirby Planet Robobot? Remember the floating, low-polygon head that was your guide in those games? Well, that head has a name, because the low-polygon digital version of that head is based on the real-world head of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, who uses that head to store his brain and teeth, as well as providing a good mounting point for his eyeballs, as well as his rich, luxuriant head of hair.

Dr. Kawashima is a Professor at the Department of Functional Brain Imaging, Institute of Development, Aging and Cancer (IDAC) at Tohoku University, where he has undertaken extensive research into brain imaging and mapping, development of brain functions, and, most relevant for what I’d like to tell you about today, Dementia Prevention.

Before I get to that, though, here’s a little reminder of how you likely have known Dr.Kawashima:

…and it’s worth mentioning that Dr.Kawashima is the only actual, living human being, and, I believe, the only neuroscientist, to be featured in a Smash Bros game:

All of this is to say that what I’m about to tell you isn’t coming from some nobody; it’s coming from a polygonal head that you may have once played some puzzles with, so you know you can trust this information. And the information you can trust is this: driving a manual transmission is good for your brain. Your ever-aging brain.

As Dr.Kawashima told Japan’s Best Car Web,

“You have to judge and then pick the optimal gear according to the situation, and this puts a better load on the brain’s cognitive functions than driving a passive automatic transmission car,”

… and you know what? He’s absolutely right about that. You do have to think about your optimal gear choice given your situation, your speed, your next steps (are you planning on making your move as you exit that corner or just flowing with traffic?), and so on. These insights are from a study undertaken by Kawashima and his colleagues at Tohoku University, which finds that the increased cognitive load of driving stick seems to have a beneficial effect on brain health and, potentially, dementia prevention. As the Best Car Web story summarizes,

“The main reason why driving a manual transmission (MT) car helps prevent dementia is that it’s “fun to drive.” Now that we’re used to automatic transmission cars, the feeling of choosing a gear ourselves, pressing the clutch, and shifting gears feels refreshing.

The fact that you have to press the clutch with your left foot and engage it with a delicate touch in conjunction with the accelerator is fundamentally different from the simple automatic transmissions and CVTs where you just put it in D range and press the accelerator and brake.”

This all feels pretty obvious to me; driving a stick shift car is a bit of a dance; you’re balancing inputs from what you see, hear, and feel, what you read on the instruments, what you feel the car doing, and then there’s the coordination of your shifting hand, clutch foot, and accelerator foot that all must work in perfect synchronization to get those nice, smooth shifts you crave.

It’s getting harder and harder to find new manual transmission cars, of course; less than 1% of new cars sold are manuals, and there are fewer than 30 currently on sale now in America. Look at this chart covering 1980 to 2025 – the L and A labels are for geared automatics, CVTs are for continuously-variable automatics, SS is “single speed,” like EVs, and all the Ms are for manual transmissions:

It’s grim! Hardly any Ms left!

But maybe this study will change some things, now that we have some evidence to show that if you want to keep an aging brain virile and sharp, there’s direct action you can take: buy your grandmother a Miata.

Top graphic images: Nintendo; Toyota