Older people's brains not slower but wiser than young brains
25 August 2011
The brains of older people are wiser than young brains and are
not slower, but only react to change when necessary. This strategy
allows older adults to achieve an equivalent level of performance,
according research undertaken at the University Geriatrics Institute of
Montreal.
“The older brain has experience and knows that nothing is gained by
jumping the gun. It was already known that aging is not necessarily
associated with a significant loss in cognitive function. When it
comes to certain tasks, the brains of older adults can achieve very
close to the same performance as those of younger ones,” explained
Dr Oury Monchi of the Univeristy of Montreal.
“We now have neurobiological evidence showing that with age comes
wisdom and that as the brain gets older, it learns to better
allocate its resources. Overall, our study shows that Aesop's fable
about the tortoise and the hare was on the money: being able to run
fast does not always win the race — you have to know how to best use
your abilities. This adage is a defining characteristic of aging.”
The study included a group of 24 people aged 18 to 35 and a group
of 10 people aged 55 to 75 who were still active professionally.
Both groups had to perform the same lexical set-shifting task. Their
speed of execution and the relevance of their responses were
evaluated. Their brain activity, particularly that of the
fronto-striatal loops during the planning and execution of a
response, was also examined using functional neuroimaging.
The original goal of the study was to explore the brain regions
and pathways that are involved in the planning and execution of
language pairing tasks. In particular, the researchers were
interested in knowing what happened when the rules of the task
changed part way through the exercise.
For the test, participants were asked to pair words according to
different lexical rules, including semantic category (animal,
object, etc.), rhyme, or the beginning of the word (attack). The
matching rules changed multiple times throughout the task without
the participants knowing. For example, if the person figured out
that the words fell under the same semantic category, the rule was
changed so that they were required to pair the words according to
rhyme instead.
Dr Monchi added, “Funny enough, the young brain is more reactive
to negative reinforcement than the older one. When the young
participants made a mistake and had to plan and execute a new
strategy to get the right answer, various parts of their brains were
recruited even before the next task began.
"However, when the older participants learned that they had made
a mistake, these regions were only recruited at the beginning of the
next trial, indicating that with age, we decide to make adjustments
only when absolutely necessary. It is as though the older brain is
more impervious to criticism and more confident than the young
brain.”
Reference
Ruben Martins, France Simard, Jean-Sebastien Provost, and Oury
Monchi. Changes in Regional and Temporal Patterns of Activity
Associated with Aging during the Performance of a Lexical
Set-Shifting Task. Cereb. Cortex (2011) first published online
August 24, 2011 doi:10.1093/cercor/bhr222