Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain
New York Times, May 20th, 2008
When older people can no longer remember names at a cocktail party,
they tend to think that their brainpower is declining. But a growing
number of studies suggest that this assumption is often wrong.
Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in
more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to
its long-term benefit.
The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”
Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease,
for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most
aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually
widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto
just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be
frustrating, it is often useful.
“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”
For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages
that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and
older work much more slowly than college students. Although the
students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of
what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when
the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they
are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in
and processing it.
When both groups were later asked questions for which the
out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much
better than the students.
“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,”
said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at
the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research
Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this
extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can
transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to
another.”
Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it
is not always clear what information is important, or will become
important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can
take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that
stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you
assess the speaker’s real impact.
“A broad attention span
may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and
the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr.
Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a
significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”
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