NEW YORK, USA, May 20, 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. Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book, said “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. “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,” said Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”