The old saying "you can't teach an old dog a new trick" is wrong for both dogs and people, research says, according to Smithsonian Magazine. It turns out adult brains hang on to extraneous information and the extra tends to bog down the brain's speed, but the mature brain is still very adaptable.
"We found that older individuals learned the task-irrelevant features that younger individuals did not learn, both the features that were sufficiently strong for younger individuals to suppress and the features that were too weak for younger individuals to learn," a new study summarized. "At the same time, there was no plasticity reduction in older individuals within the task tested. These results suggest that the older visual system is less stable to unimportant information than the younger visual system. A learning problem with older individuals may be due to a decrease in stability rather than a decrease in plasticity..."
The study participants were given a visual task: keep an eye on six letters and two numbers on slides of moving dots. The test subjects were asked what numbers they could see.
"But it was perception of the dots that was being tested," according to the Los Angeles Times. "Researchers tinkered with how many of those wandering dots moved in a 'coherent' way from frame to frame. Some proportions were so small that they were below the threshold of conscious detection, while others were too obvious to ignore."
Even though some dots moved in an obvious pattern, the pattern was ignored by the younger subjects and noticed by the older subjects, according to Smithsonian Magazine, even though the elder subjects thought perhaps the information would be unimportant.
That could be a good thing or a bad thing. "If you learn more unnecessary things, then there is a risk of replacing important, existing information in the brain with something trivial," said researcher Takeo Watanabe of Brown University in Current Biology, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The older participants had an increasingly harder time filtering as the information became more irrelevant. The study's findings could explain why older folk have a difficult time learning new things that have a lot of distractions (like the internet), according to Smithsonian Magazine.
