Blogging: Good for Your Mental Health?

An article titled A crossword puzzle a day may delay dementia makes the case that "doing crossword puzzles, reading, and playing cards daily may delay the rapid memory decline that occurs if people develop dementia". Good news for me and my wife.. we love to do crossword puzzles we find in magazines and newspapers as well as books from Simon and Schuster. Here are a few clips from the article:

Researchers from New York's Albert Einstein College of Medicine spent five years following 488 people aged 75 to 85 who did not have dementia at the start of the study. During the study period, 101 of these people developed dementia.

At the start of the study the participants reported how often they participated in six leisure mind activities — reading, writing, doing crossword puzzles, playing board or card games, having group discussions, and playing music.
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The researchers then looked at the point when memory loss started accelerating rapidly and found that for every additional activity a person participated in, the onset of rapid memory loss was delayed by 0.18 years.

I wonder how many folks watch a lot of mindless TV instead of engaging their brains in stimulating activities like blogging? I wonder.. maybe engaging in stimulating blogging dialog is good for your mental health.. even if it is not so much beneficial for other parts of your body :)