Contrary to popular beliefs that older brains become slower due to cognitive decline, a new study found that this "slowing down" has more to do with greater life experiences than declining capacity.
Have you even wondered why our brains tend to function slower when as we age? Many studies have sited cognitive decline as the reason for this but University of Tuebingen may have found another reason for this, which can be best explained by taking the example of a sponge.
You may have noticed that when the sponge is dry it has a greater capacity to absorb water. However, with time the absorption capacity gets slower because the sponge is already filled with water. Our brain is similar to a sponge. When we're young, the brain can absorb new information quickly. However, as we age our minds get filled with knowledge and hence, it takes a little longer to process or retain new information.
Researchers of this new study conducted a little experiment on a computer. The computer represented the human brain. Researchers noted that when the computer was made to learn just one new thing a day or given a "small" portion to read, it acted like the brains of a young person. However, when it was subjected to a lifetime of experiences, its performance looked like that of an older adult.
In the second scenario the computer became slower, not because its processing capacity had decline but because its database had grown and it had more information to process.
"What does this finding mean for our understanding of our ageing minds, for example older adults' increased difficulties with word recall? These are traditionally thought to reveal how our memory for words deteriorates with age, but Big Data adds a twist to this idea," said Dr. Michael Ramscar of the University of Tuebingen in a statement. "Technology now allows researchers to make quantitative estimates about the number of words an adult can be expected to learn across a lifetime, enabling the team to separate the challenge that increasing knowledge poses to memory from the actual performance of memory itself."
Editors Wayne Gray and Thomas Hills of 'Topics in Cognitive Science' argue that the findings of this study compel us to "rethink what we mean by the aging mind before our false assumptions result in decisions and policies that marginalize the old or waste precious public resources to remediate problems that do not exist."
