Long-held beliefs have held that increasing age causes a decline in mental ability. Georgetown University Medical Center has just released some surprising good news to counter this belief.
These findings were published in Nature Human Behavior. They show that two mental abilities which enable us to pay attention to new information and focus on the important things in a situation can actually improve brain function in healthy aging older people. These functions are crucial to cognition, including memory, decision-making, self-control, navigation, math and language.
“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 US and around the world,”
“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.”
Ullman states that this is especially important given the rapid aging of the population in America and the rest of the world. Ullman says that it is possible to improve these skills with more research. This could help protect against brain decline as a result of healthy aging or disorders.
Joao Verissimo PhD, first author, was an assistant professor at University of Lisbon. The team examined three components of attention and executive functions in 702 participants, ranging from 58 to 98. These ages were chosen because cognition changes most in aging.
They studied the brain networks that are involved in executive inhibition, alerting, and orienting. Each component has its own characteristics and depends on different brain regions, neurochemicals, and genes. Ullman and Verissimo argued that the networks could also display different patterns of aging.
The mental ability alerting consists of heightened vigilance and preparedness to respond to any incoming information. Orienting is a process of shifting brain resources to a specific location in space. The executivenetwork blocks distracting and conflicting information to allow us to concentrate on what’s most important.
Verissimo says, “We use all three of these processes constantly.” For example, alerting when driving a car is an increase in your preparedness to approach an intersection. Orienting is when your attention shifts to an unanticipated movement such as a pedestrian. executivefunction lets you block distractions like billboards or birds so that you can focus on driving.
Only alerting skills declined with age, according to the study. However, the mental abilities executive inhibition and orienting actually increased.
Researchers believe that orienting or inhibition can be improved with continued practice. Ullman, Verissimo and Verissimo believe that the benefits of this practice may be sufficient to offset any underlying neural declines. They believe that alerting can decline because of the basic state and level of preparedness.
Verissimo states that the findings are reliable because they were based on a large sample and have ruled out many other explanations. Verissimo explains that the findings have broad implications because many behaviors are influenced by mental abilities such as orienting or inhibitory skills.
Ullman says that the findings will not only alter our understanding of how aging affects the brain’s mental abilities, but could also lead to clinical improvements for patients with aging disorders like Alzheimer’s.
Source: https://gumc.georgetown.edu/