Photo by The News-Gazette / John Dixon 

Senior Odyssey coach Lindsey Burt plays a board game with participants, from left, Doris Ford, Steve Palmer, Vince Ventura and Kay Stauffer at Lincoln Square Village in Urbana last week.

Alittle more than a year ago, 70-year-old Eileen Bunting looked across the street and saw a fire hydrant.

Except when she saw the hydrant, she couldn't remember what it was called. It took her several days to recall the words, fire hydrant.

As you get older, she said, sometimes it takes a while to recall or spell words.

"Now I seem to have less trouble bringing words to my mind. Now when I forget the title for a word, I let my mind relax. I think it out and it comes," said the Mahomet resident.

As a research participant in the University of Illinois' Senior Odyssey project, Bunting spent several weeks in the spring playing word and number games. And with a team of other seniors, she figured out solutions to challenges, such as how to wrap several items with a limited amount of paper and Scotch tape within a time limit.

The seniors tackled word puzzles, anagrams – "the type of stuff that makes your brain work," said participant Steve Palmer, a 66-year-old from Champaign. "That's the premise of the whole study. If older people use their brains, they won't lose it," he said.

People know exercise helps maintain muscles and keep bones healthy. But can exercising your brain help you remember and improve the way you think?

That's a question UI professor and lead investigator Elizabeth Stine-Morrow and other researchers are working on with Senior Odyssey.

With funding from the National Institute on Aging, the five-year project, based on the Odyssey of the Mind model, is starting its second year. Coordinators are currently seeking research participants. They must be 60 years or older and do less than 15 hours per week of regular volunteer or paid work. The program has 16 weekly sessions and concludes with a tournament in the spring.

The program begins with participants taking cognitive tests. For their time, seniors are paid $50 for those tests and another $50 for completing tests in the spring.

Testing starts this month.

After the tests are completed, seniors are randomly assigned to one of three groups, said Donna Whitehill, program coordinator with the Adult Learning Laboratory at the UI's Beckman Institute. Some will work with an undergraduate coach and meet weekly at the Senior Odyssey office in Lincoln Square Village. Another group will complete puzzles at home and meet in the office to check answers. The third group will be assigned to a waiting list.

The goal is to have 160 participants per year.

Whitehill and assistant coordinator Jennifer Kapolnek have been recruiting seniors throughout the summer at park district events, senior living complexes, churches, farmers markets and other events.

"This town is rich with highly engaged people. We're trying to target people who are a little less involved," Whitehill said.

These seniors may benefit most from the program and show the most measurable changes after participating, she said.

Some people buy into a belief that children are expected to spend their time learning in school and participating in leisure activities, middle-age people are expected to spend their time working, some of it learning and some of it with leisure activities, and older adults are expected to spend their time doing leisure activities, Kapolnek said.

"But it's beneficial for all ages to spend their time in all three categories of working, learning and leisure," Kapolnek said. "It's not inappropriate for older adults to come out and continue learning," she said.

As for Palmer, he said his involvement in the research program "was really enjoyable to me. It was one of those things where we'd leave on a Wednesday and I couldn't wait to get back the next week."

Interested participants can call Senior Odyssey at 265-6904 or send an e-mail to seniorodyssey@sbcglobal.net .