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The more you exercise your brain, the more mentally sharp you’ll stay as you age — and given how much of our lives we spend at work, our jobs likely play a major factor, says neuroscientist Tommy Wood.
“The more [mentally] complex and demanding your job is, the lower your risk of dementia. So it’s not necessarily specific jobs, it’s what the work entails,” says Wood, an associate professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at the University of Washington and author of “The Stimulated Mind: Future-Proof Your Brain from Dementia and Stay Sharp at Any Age.”
Brain health and mental sharpness are popular topics in health science these days, particularly as many Americans grow increasingly interested in boosting their longevity. Globally, people are living longer — one in six people worldwide will be age 60 or older by 2030, according to the World Health Organization — yet a longer life expectancy doesn’t necessarily mean living longer in good health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention projects that nearly 14 million U.S. adults will have Alzheimer’s disease by 2060, up from a current estimate of 7.4 million from the Alzheimer’s Association.
Research connects some careers to a lower risk of age-related mental decline. One Harvard Medical School study, published in December 2024, cited taxi and ambulance drivers — jobs that classically demand high amounts of spatial reasoning within memorized mental maps of city streets — as the least likely to die from Alzheimer’s disease in comparison to more than 400 occupations.
Notably, the researchers analyzed death certificates from January 2020 to December 2022, meaning at least some of the people they studied predominantly worked in a pre-GPS era. In most of the world, today’s drivers probably use smartphones, at least somewhat, to tell them where to go.
Still, the study’s findings reinforce an important concept, says Wood: Brain health-boosting jobs of all kinds tend to share at least one of three core concepts. Don’t worry too much if your job doesn’t have any of the three, he adds — you can gain similar benefits by how you use your brain off the clock.
3 aspects of brain health-boosting jobs
1. Spatial processing
When jobs encourage “spatial processing,” or your ability to recall how to navigate spaces from memory, you actively engage your hippocampus, Wood says. The hippocampus is a region in the brain that is responsible for memory and learning, and it usually shrinks during the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
“When you challenge that part of the brain, it responds. It improves its function,” Wood says. Centuries ago, when humans hunted for food and traveled across new landscapes to find a place to settle, “that required navigation,” Wood says.
Unlike bus drivers who follow the same route daily, taxi and ambulance drivers typically travel to different locations every day. The brain-boosting benefits of those jobs are “probably going to be changing now … if everybody’s using GPS,” says Wood. But in some parts of the world, the roles haven’t really changed: In London, for example, “black cab” drivers must remember over 25,000 streets within a six-mile radius to get their license, a challenge called “The Knowledge.”
Neuroscientists compared the MRIs of London taxi drivers to the MRIs of residents who don’t drive taxis and found that the cab drivers’ hippocampi were significantly larger, according to a small study published in 2000. Other people who have these kinds of professions can challenge themselves by not relying on navigation devices, and their brains will likely benefit from it, Wood says.
2. Creativity
Creative jobs that involve dance, music, physical art or video gaming require complex processing, Wood says. People with expertise in those creative areas tend to have delayed brain aging compared to those who do not engage in those practices, according to an October 2025 article in the academic journal Nature Communications written by 50 different researchers.
“Their brains tend to look or act as if they’re younger,” Wood says. “The networks that are in your brain that are responsible for focus and attention like complex processing. They tend to work better and be more efficient.”
Creative careers usually involve problem solving, learning new skills and managing or working with other people in teams, says Wood. Mastering those activities is associated with enhancing brain health and protecting the organ from premature aging, he adds.
With “creativity, there’s just something about activating all the different networks … that seems to be really beneficial,” Wood says.
3. Job latitude
Job latitude is how much your job responsibilities change on a daily basis, Wood says — meetings one day, analyzing data the following day, giving presentations the day after that, and so on. If you’re wondering whether your career has job latitude, says Wood, ask yourself: “Are you doing a different thing every day?”
Often, neurology and neuroscience experts refer to jobs with latitude as “complex jobs.” Having a career with complexity is associated with a stronger memory and a lower risk of dementia, according to a 2023 study of 355 older U.S. adults conducted by a group of sociology, medicine, neuroscience and neurology researchers. Complex work can range from interacting with different types of people as a social worker to managing intricate datasets as an analyst, and multiple studies support the positive effects of complex jobs on cognitive health.
The tasks you complete at work should also be cognitively challenging, Wood says. Working a job that stimulates your brain between ages 30 and 65 may decrease your risk of dementia, according to a 2024 research article co-authored by a group of longevity health experts from Oslo University Hospital, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and more.
But it’s important to have agency over the pace of your work and maintain a manageable workload to see brain-health benefits, Wood says. “If your work is really hard cognitively, but you’re always working on somebody else’s time schedule, they’ve dumped a ton on your plate, you never get a chance to take a break, or you don’t have control over your own schedule, that decreases the potential benefits,” he says.
What if your job doesn’t have those qualities? Try this
“Not everybody gets to have a job that has all of these elements,” Wood says. But since “the primary driver of how your brain functions is how you use it,” you can still boost your brain health even if you aren’t a cab driver, musician or a social worker.
Here are Wood’s suggestions for staying mentally sharp in any profession.
Be more social at work
Embrace the social component of your job, Wood says. “Even if you are doing a relatively repetitive job, we know that social connection or social input from work is really important.”
Maintaining quality social connections throughout your life can greatly benefit your cognitive abilities, said Dr. Wendy Suzuki, a neuroscientist and professor at NYU, during an episode of a MasterClass series on improving brain health. “Laughing and pleasurable social interactions decrease your stress levels,” Suzuki said, while long-term stress can degrade your memory and up your chances of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
You can get a lot of your social interaction outside of work hours, but it can also be helpful for your brain if you “spend time with your colleagues, talk to them [and] lean into the social side of your work,” Wood says.
Engage in brain-stimulating activities off the clock
You can always incorporate some tried-and-true activities for brain health into your routine outside of work. Even “if [you] do more cognitively stimulating activities later in life,” you can still see benefits, Wood says.
He suggests implementing practices in your weekly routine like:
- Taking up new hobbies
- Volunteering
- Learning new skills like studying a new language
- Trying a new sport
- Signing up for, or watching, lectures about topics you’re interested in
- Solving crossword puzzles
- Reading books
Ask yourself, Wood says: “Is there a skill or a hobby or some new thing that you can do to challenge your brain in a new way?”
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