[LINK] New research finds some brain functions actually improve with age

Kim Holburn kim at holburn.net
Fri Feb 23 09:40:21 AEDT 2007


http://www.nwfdailynews.com/article/2230

> New research finds some brain functions actually improve with age
> SHARON BEGLEY The Wall Street Journal
> 2007-02-21
> Comment on this Story | Read Comments
>
> The aging brain is subject to a dreary litany of changes. It  
> shrinks, Swiss cheese-like holes grow, connections between neurons  
> become sparser, blood flow and oxygen supply fall. That leads to  
> trouble with short-term memory and rapidly switching attention,  
> among other problems. And that's in a healthy brain.
>
> But it's not all doom and gloom. An emerging body of research shows  
> that a surprising array of mental functions hold up well into old  
> age, while others actually get better. Vocabulary improves, as do  
> other verbal abilities such as facility with synonyms and antonyms.  
> Older brains are packed with more so-called expert knowledge _  
> information relevant to your occupation or hobby. (Older bridge  
> enthusiasts have at their mental beck-and-call many more bids and  
> responses.) They also store more "cognitive templates," or mental  
> outlines of generic problems and solutions that can be tapped when  
> confronting new problems.
>
> Eric Kandel, 77 years old, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in  
> medicine, maintains an active lab at Columbia University and  
> mentors younger scientists. "I think I do science better than I did  
> when I was younger," he says. "In science, judgment is so  
> important, and I now have a better understanding of which problems  
> are important and which aren't."
>
> Growing awareness that old brains aren't necessarily senile brains  
> is already fueling a slew of consumer offerings. Brain exercises  
> developed for older adults by Posit Science Corp. in San Francisco  
> are being offered by retirement communities, senior centers and  
> assisted-living facilities, as well as by insurers such as Humana  
> to their Medicare enrollees. The computer-based program includes  
> exercises intended to improve memory and attention, as well as  
> sharpness of hearing. Continuing, peer-reviewed studies conducted  
> by Posit scientists suggest it can roll back the mental agility  
> calendar by at least a decade.
>
> Some retirement communities and assisted-living centers are  
> installing a touch-screen-based cognitive fitness program developed  
> by Dakim Inc. of Santa Monica, Calif., that gives seniors practice  
> on seven cognitive skills, including language and the kind of  
> visual-spatial processing that helps you read a map. The system  
> uses "age-appropriate" film and audio clips, such as Jimmy Stewart  
> movies, as the basis for short-term memory exercises and adds new  
> exercises every 24 to 48 hours.
>
> Discoveries of brain functions that hold up, or even improve,  
> through the decades could affect corporate and public policy. As  
> baby boomers age, many are resisting mandatory retirement. In  
> January, a special committee of the New York State Bar Association  
> recommended that law firms abandon the practice. Air-traffic  
> controllers are asking federal agencies to reconsider the  
> requirement that they retire at age 55, and the Federal Aviation  
> Administration in January proposed pushing back the mandatory  
> retirement age for commercial pilots, which is currently 60.
>
> The emerging neuroscience is on their side. One of the most robust  
> cognitive abilities is semantic memory, which is recollection of  
> facts and figures. "Semantic memory is relatively resistant to the  
> effects of aging," says psychology professor Arthur Kramer of the  
> University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Semantic memory includes  
> vocabulary, which increases with age so reliably (at least in  
> people who continue reading) that a younger person should never  
> challenge a sharp 75-year-old to a crossword puzzle.
>
> Expert knowledge _ information about an occupational or even  
> hobbyist specialty _ resists the effects of aging, too, which is  
> why mumbling "accrued postretirement liabilities" to an 80-year-old  
> actuary makes his relevant synapses fire as robustly as they did at  
> age 40. Synapses that encode expert knowledge "are written in  
> stone," says neuroscientist John Morrison of the Mount Sinai School  
> of Medicine in New York.
>
> The longevity of expert knowledge and cognitive templates lies  
> behind the finding that air-traffic controllers in their 60s are at  
> least as skilled as those in their 30s. When Prof. Kramer of  
> Illinois and a colleague at the Massachusetts Institute of  
> Technology gave older controllers standard lab tests for reaction  
> speed, memory, attention and the like, they found the usual:  
> Performance declined compared with that of 30-somethings.
>
> But on more fast-paced, complex _ and hence realistic _ tests in  
> which they juggled multiple airliners and handled emergencies, the  
> senior controllers did as well as or better than the young ones.  
> They kept simulated planes safely away from each other, and when  
> they ordered planes to change their altitude, heading or speed to  
> avoid a collision, they used fewer commands than younger ones. It  
> was as if their experience had equipped them with the most  
> efficient algorithm for keeping the planes safely spaced.
>
> "Their experience and their knowledge of aircraft types and  
> strategies they've used for years can compensate for a decline in  
> these other abilities," says Prof. Kramer, who has submitted the  
> study to a science journal. The findings, he says, suggest the need  
> to revisit "the whole notion of when we need to retire people,  
> since their ability to do these complex tasks resists decline."
>
> That 60-somethings can mentally juggle multiple 747s seems to go  
> against the idea that aging hurts the ability to pay attention. But  
> studies show that selective attention, the ability to focus on  
> something and resist distractions, doesn't decline with age. For  
> controllers, that means they can focus on planes in their sector  
> despite a hubbub of activity in the control tower. For other  
> seniors, it means no problem keeping eyes and mind on a highway  
> despite flashing road signs or noisy passengers.
>
> The biggest benefit of an older brain is that fewer real-life  
> challenges require deliberate, effortful problem-solving. Where  
> once it took hours of methodical scrutiny to understand a  
> prospectus, for instance, older lawyers and investment bankers can  
> zoom in on crucial sections and fit them into what they already know.
>
> Elkhonon Goldberg, a neuropsychologist who has a private practice  
> and is a professor at New York University School of Medicine, finds  
> that he can also grasp the essence of data presented in scientific  
> papers more readily than he once could, something that more than  
> makes up for losses in other mental realms. "I am not nearly as  
> good at laborious, grinding, focused mental computations," he says,  
> "but then again, I do not experience the need to resort to them  
> nearly as often."
>
> While younger brains solve problems step-by-step, older brains call  
> on cognitive templates, those generic outlines of a problem and a  
> solution that worked before. It's the feeling you get when you see  
> that a new situation or problem belongs to a class of situations or  
> problems you have encountered before, with the result that you  
> don't have to attack them methodically. Yes, older people forget  
> little things, and may have occasional attention lapses, but their  
> cognitive templates are so rich that they more than hold their own.  
> Their brains can keep up even with a diminished supply of blood and  
> oxygen.
>
> As a result, older professionals can readily separate what's  
> important from what's not, a big reason so many of them fire on all  
> cognitive cylinders well past age 65. "I'd say that the ability to  
> make a significant contribution as a lawyer actually increases with  
> time, experience and age," says attorney Mark Zauderer, 60, a  
> partner in the New York law firm Flemming Zulack Williamson Zauderer.
>
> In complex business litigation, he says, where pretrial discovery  
> can yield enough documents to fill a warehouse, "a lawyer must be  
> able to sort the wheat from the chaff, to take all these facts and  
> extract only those that support winning themes. A senior lawyer is  
> in the best position to do that, and to have the courage to discard  
> facts _ even those on your side _ that will only distract the court  
> or the jury."
>
> "Some things you just need to grind into your system for many years  
> until they become automatic and seemingly effortless," says Naftali  
> Raz of the Institute of Gerontology at Wayne State University in  
> Detroit. "That may be the key. Automatic functions are least  
> sensitive to aging. So, if the decisions are based on knowledge and  
> skill, older folks may have an advantage over younger decision  
> makers just because they have to do less mental heavy lifting."
>
> More research is coming. Although studies on aging have long  
> focused on diseases such as Alzheimer's, scientists are  
> increasingly investigating healthy aging, trying to discover which  
> factors allow some people to resist the usual ravages of time, and  
> to get a better sense of how well older adults can function. The  
> National Institutes of Health, the nation's leading funder of  
> biomedical research, doesn't break out "healthy aging" as a  
> separate budget item, but spokeswoman Linda Joy says that more  
> funding is going to studies of people who reach their 60s, 70s and  
> beyond with little or no disease. Scientists hope that by  
> identifying which mental functions are largely untouched by aging,  
> they will be able to develop treatments or exercises to shore up  
> functions that do deteriorate.
>
> The benefits that come to the mind and brain with age extend beyond  
> thinking. They also include a greater ability to put yourself in  
> another person's mind, empathizing and understanding his thought  
> processes _ emotional wisdom. Civil engineer Samuel Florman, 81,  
> remains active in his Scarsdale, N.Y., construction company and  
> says that as he has grown older, he "has gotten better with people,  
> more understanding of young people and more patient with aggressive  
> ones. I'm more savvy about when to rush and when not to."
>
> That likely reflects the older brain's greater control over  
> emotions, especially negative ones such as impatience and anger. A  
> 2006 study of 250 people ranging in age from adolescence to their  
> late 70s documented for the first time "positive changes in the  
> emotional brain," according to the Society for Neuroscience, which  
> publishes the Journal of Neuroscience. In the experiment, Leanne  
> Williams of the University of Sydney showed the volunteers pictures  
> of faces expressing emotions. Using fMRI brain imaging, it was  
> found that circuits in "medial prefrontal" areas _ right behind the  
> forehead _ were more active in older people than younger people  
> when processing negative emotional expressions. The greater  
> activity suggests better control of reactions to other people's  
> anger, fear and the like. This greater sensitivity seems to  
> translate into decreasing neuroticism, and greater emotional  
> equanimity.
>
> That doesn't mean older brains flatline when it comes to  
> sensitivity. Instead, they often show a keen emotional intelligence  
> and ability to judge character. Elderly volunteers given a list of  
> behaviors that describe a made-up person ignored irrelevant  
> information (favorite color, place of birth) when asked to judge  
> the person's character and focused on revealing traits better than  
> younger people did, according to research by Thomas Hess, a  
> professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. They  
> were more likely to infer correctly that the person was dishonest,  
> kind or intelligent _ a skill that is arguably more important than  
> the ability to memorize a list of words in a lab experiment.



--
Kim Holburn
IT Network & Security Consultant
Ph: +39 06 855 4294  M: +39 3342707610
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                           -- Lloyd Biggle, Jr. Analog, Apr 1961






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