I’ve been wondering about this for years now…

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain

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.

I’m only (yes…Only!) 54 years old and I’ve been struggling with the sensation for years now that my world is getting too full of information.  But I’ve always reckoned that to be a consequence of the information age. 

Maybe not so much… 

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “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

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review…

You know…I remember that.  In school, whenever I stumbled over something that didn’t seem to make any sense, I’d just roll on by and hope that I got something later on that made the awkward piece fit in.  I try to do that now, and my mind just won’t seem to let the awkward piece go and move on.  It gets frustrating.  I feel as though I’m learning more slowly.

And I’ve always…Always…been easily distracted.  Unless I’m totally focused on something, in which case I’m more like an obsessive then an absent minded little geek.  But that total mental focus comes in spurts.  Like when I’m drawing something, or photographing something, or deep into code at work.  Then it’s almost as if I’m in a trance.  I just can’t keep that up for long though.  And the totally focused moments are always in familiar mental territory.   When I’m working with the camera, or at my drafting table, I Know what I’m doing.  Beyond those moments, I seem to be more and more adrift in a restless sea of information, where my attention is constantly being grabbed by this and that.

And I get pissed and start tuning things out.  Much of my day is a struggle to filter.  In my adolescence I used to dislike most advertising.  Now I loath it.  Never mind spam…mainstream corporate commercial advertising just seems to get more and more Insistent every year that you Have to pay attention to it, and always right at some moment my mind is busy with something else. The reason I stopped listening to broadcast radio long ago was that I didn’t like being busy with something around the house with music playing in the background, and suddenly my attention is yanked away from whatever I’m working on by a commercial.  They work Hard to grab your attention.  It isn’t just they compress the audio so the commercials seem louder, they use a host of sound gimmicks besides that to draw your attention to the ad.  Ever notice how a lot of ads are conversations now between two people talking in an urgent, or excited tone of voice?  Or maybe it’s someone who sounds vaguely like a friendly authority figure from your past…someone you used to respect and listen to a lot.  You can’t help but listen.  Lets hear it for the off switch.

I actually spend a lot of my day at home now in complete silence and I don’t even notice it.  When I do listen to music, it’s usually via the iPod while I’m fussing around the house doing chores.  There was a time I liked to have the radio or TV going in the background for company.  Now I very seldom do that, because it’s just too distracting.  For quite some time now I’ve been wondering, and worrying, if this is because my mind is getting older and slower, or because my world is just getting too crammed with information demanding my attention.  It might be neither.  My 54 year old brain may just be getting better at sucking it all in. 

“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,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

Creativity has always been my trump card in life.  Pulling rabbits out of the hat as I like to think of it.  It gets me by when my plain looks, horrible fashion sense, and general social geekiness seem like a ball and chain.  I can figure things out, usually before any of the cool kids do, and that keeps me in the game.  I can think outside the box.  I can create.  And this is why, ultimately, I didn’t end up in a dead end job.  Yes, there was a lot of luck involved too, but some brains just can’t recognize a dead end when they encounter one.  There are no dead ends, only difficulties that you can’t let go of until you understand them. 

But every Yin has its Yang and severe social geekery may not be so much a curse as the price you pay for having that creative mind.  That, and a feeling of being overwhelmed more and more as you get older.  I’m not getting stupider after all.  My bandwidth isn’t narrowing, it’s still slowly getting wider and wider as I walk through life learning more and more and that has consequences I wouldn’t have expected.  And unexpected consequences means that life is still interesting and I’m still in the game.  So I reckon I need to adjust my coping mechanisms somewhat. 

Relax and enjoy the inevitable as Heinlein would say.  I’m beginning to see now why older people seem to always look so bewildered.  It’s not that life is passing them by.  Some of them anyway.  It’s that it’s all rushing in on them more then when they were young.  I probably need to just get comfortable with constantly feeling like I’m swimming in a torrent of data.  That feeling of being overwhelmed means that my brain is still working the way its supposed to, not that it’s getting tired and loosing its edge.  So just get on with it.