Aging can Improve Key Mental Abilities

The two key brain functions, which allow us to attend to new information and focus on what’s important in a given situation, are improved in older individuals. These functions underlie critical aspects of cognition such as memory, decision making, and self-control, and even navigation, math, language, and reading.

New research from Georgetown University Medical Center surprisingly offers this view. The findings of the study are published in Nature Human Behavior.

“These results are amazing, and have important consequences for how we should view aging,” says the study’s senior investigator, Michael T. Ullman, PhD, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience, and Director of Georgetown’s Brain and Language Lab.

People have widely assumed that cognitive functions decline with age, despite intriguing hints from smaller-scale studies that raised questions about these assumptions. This study has given a strong counter view.

The research team looked at three separate components of attention and executive function in a group of 702 participants aged 58 to 98. They focused on these ages since this is when cognition often changes the most during aging.

The components they studied are the brain networks involved in alerting, orienting, and executive inhibition. Each has different characteristics and relies on different brain areas and different neurochemicals and genes.

Alerting is characterized by a state of enhanced vigilance and preparedness to respond to incoming information. Orienting involves shifting brain resources to a particular location in space. The executive network inhibits distracting or conflicting information, allowing us to focus on what’s important.

The study found that only alerting abilities declined with age. In contrast, both orienting and executive inhibition improved.

Researchers hypothesize that because orienting and inhibition are simply skills that allow people to selectively attend to objects, these skills can improve with lifelong practice.

The gains from this practice can be large enough to outweigh the underlying neural declines. In contrast, they believe that alerting declines because this basic state of vigilance and preparedness cannot improve with practice.

As the number of participants was relatively large and numerous alternative explanations were ruled out, the findings should be reliable and may apply quite broadly.

They also further explained that orienting and inhibitory skills can reflect numerous behaviors and so these findings have wide-ranging implications.



Source-Medindia