I have recently come across some studies regarding the aging brain and how its skills improve between the age of 60 and 90, provided a person is not suffering from a specific degenerative or neurological disorder.
Here are some links to articles:
I would refer to these two links with a grain of salt: this article was broadly published by the international press, but lacks the key source it mentions at the end.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2 ... 102253.htm
The following three articles are actual sources I have sought and found about the contents of the broadly published article.
https://www.the-cma.org.uk/articles/old ... ains-4344/The brains of older people are not slower but rather wiser than young brains, which allows older adults to achieve an equivalent level of performance, according research undertaken at the University Geriatrics Institute of Montreal by Dr. Oury Monchi and Dr. Ruben Martins of the University 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. Monchi. "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 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 this 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.
"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," stated Dr. Monchi.
The study was published in Cerebral Cortex and received funding from the Foundation Institut de gériatrie de Montréal and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
https://gumc.georgetown.edu/news-releas ... ing-aging/Researchers at the University of Montreal have found that, as we age physically, a so-called “old brain”, is not a “slow brain”. The researchers say that this is because of learned wisdom – which allows older people to achieve an equivalent level of performance to younger adults.
Lead researcher Dr. Oury Monchi explained:
“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."
"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.”
I find this is comforting news and also feel that Artificial Intelligence can provide support in a way, but should never be used to replace the actual exercise that our brains require in order to keep fit.Key Mental Abilities Can Actually Improve During Aging
WASHINGTON (August 19, 2021) — It’s long been believed that advancing age leads to broad declines in our mental abilities. Now, new research from Georgetown University Medical Center offers surprisingly good news by countering this view.
The findings, published August 19, 2021, in Nature Human Behavior, show that two key brain functions, which allow us to attend to new information and to focus on what’s important in a given situation, can in fact improve 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.
“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 attention and executive functions decline with age, despite intriguing hints from some smaller-scale studies that raised questions about these assumptions,” he says. “But the results from our large study indicate that critical elements of these abilities actually improve during aging, likely because we simply practice these skills throughout our life.”
“This is all the more important because of the rapidly aging population, both in the U.S. and around the world,” Ullman says. He adds that with further research, it may be possible to deliberately improve these skills as protection against brain decline in healthy aging and disorders.
The research team, which includes first author João Veríssimo, PhD, an assistant professor at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, 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. Therefore, Ullman and Veríssimo reasoned, the networks may also show different aging patterns.
Alerting is characterized by a state of enhanced vigilance and preparedness in order 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.
“We use all three processes constantly,” Veríssimo explains. “For example, when you are driving a car, alerting is your increased preparedness when you approach an intersection. Orienting occurs when you shift your attention to an unexpected movement, such as a pedestrian. And executive function allows you to inhibit distractions such as birds or billboards so you can stay focused on driving.”
The study found that only alerting abilities declined with age. In contrast, both orienting and executive inhibition actually improved.
The 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, Ullman and Veríssimo suggest. In contrast, they believe that alerting declines because this basic state of vigilance and preparedness cannot improve with practice.
“Because of the relatively large number of participants, and because we ruled out numerous alternative explanations, the findings should be reliable and so may apply quite broadly,” Veríssimo says. Moreover, he explains that “because orienting and inhibitory skills underlie numerous behaviors, the results have wide-ranging implications.”
“The findings not only change our view of how aging affects the mind, but may also lead to clinical improvements, including for patients with aging disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease,” says Ullman.
Ullman and Veríssimo report having no personal financial interests related to the study.
In addition to Ullman and Veríssimo, the authors include Paul Verhaeghen, Georgia Institute of Technology; Noreen Goldman, Princeton University; and Maxine Weinstein, Georgetown University.
This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (R01 AG016790, R01 AG016661); the National Science Foundation (BCS 1940980); the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; and the Georgetown Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.