Age may be a positive for the brain: new study is trying to define 'wisdom'

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The New York Times:

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

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.”

“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.

This actually makes sense. Kids learn omnivorously. They don’t necessarily make the kinds of factual and remembered associations older people do as a matter of course. They haven't learned to do that.

The result of this exercise was illustrative:

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.

The opinion is that the broader attention span is a real asset. You have to have the facts, and retain them, to put them together. Unfortunately that also means that the ADD plague might be even more serious than it looks, but here’s the stunner in the findings:

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.

In other words, a brain that does more work by picking up more information. That meshes with some of the findings about synaptic development in some people being much more developed in others. The brain literally grows itself in relation to its uses. It even grows receptors for junk food, it’s that adaptable.

A match between information handling and creativity isn’t likely to be a coincidence.

It’s also an interesting development of the basic argument about older brains, because it also relates to health. The brain is high maintenance, and a very demanding organ in terms of its needs. These findings relate to people whose brains are obviously working pretty well in their 60s.

There’s a further qualifier, though, that needs some thought, if you’ll excuse the expression.

This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.

That’s interesting, because that area of the brain is the so-called Executive Function area, the decision maker.

What isn’t mentioned, however, is that creative thinking is very much a matter of making decisions. Anyone, in any creative medium, has to work with options, sometimes at saturation level. In addition to which, quite a lot of data has to be retained throughout the creative process. On the face of it, that finding may actually contradict at least some of the fact.

So I’ll add a qualifier to their qualifier. It may be that the condition of the prefrontal cortex in these cases relates to a different approach to decision making, which would naturally involve a different method of handling information.