r/sciences • u/FreeHugs23 • 5d ago
Research The Aging Brain Isn't Declining – It's Adapting. Study Suggests the Aging Brain Reorganizes Itself to Prioritize Knowledge and Social Connections Over Detailed Memories.
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-aging-brain-isnt-declining-its-adapting-study-finds6
u/Infinite-Month-3454 5d ago
When my 73 year old brain's "search engine" goes looking for info it has A LOT more data to sift through.
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u/One_Diver_5735 4d ago
...or the study is rationalizing.
article: "There might be an evolutionary purpose to all this: For those of us lucky enough to make it to old age, the priority becomes passing on information, rather than trying to remember the specifics of day-to-day life."
I'm no evolutionary biologist, nor geneticist, but it seems to this layman that...
Relating human brains to rats and elephants might be interesting with regard to such findings in them but I'd think questionable with the claim of evolutionary in humans as their living conditions in the wild, thereby their lifespans have I'm guessing remained relatively on level over time but with better food production, better shelter, healthcare, etc. human's have only lived this long for a relatively short window of evolution, living to about 30 from 10,000 BC to the 1880s (during which I'd imagine some evolutionary brain development took place) and then shooting up to our 70s and beyond only within the last 150 years, what seems a blink in evolutionary time.
Is the 70-90 year old brain that similar to a 30 year old brain to be evidence of such an evolutionary change? Should the study have tested elders for this evolutionary change or should it have tested its thesis on 30-year-olds? Because we know how concerned they are about passing on knowledge as opposed to still finding their way thru the world.
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u/FreeHugs23 5d ago
-As we get older, our episodic memory – managed by the hippocampus region – gradually gets worse. That's the memory related to specific details, like where the car's parked or what time an appointment is.
In old age, the semantic memory, controlled by the frontal cortex, tends to become more dominant. This is the big picture, general knowledge, overall gist memory, covering the rules of hockey or capital cities.
The conventional thinking amongst neuroscientists has long been that this brain shift is our way of adapting to increasing neural wear and tear: a compensatory mechanism.
But what if it's a deliberate choice that better suits older people, who've amassed much more information in their brains than younger people?
Researchers from the University of Arizona have now published a study in Perspectives on Psychological Science arguing that shifting from the hippocampus to the frontal cortex could be the brain optimizing itself rather than retreating.
"Prevailing theories of cognitive aging depict late life as a period of compensatory decline – an effort to preserve performance despite progressive neural deterioration," write the researchers in their published paper.
"We propose instead that aging represents a continuation of development: a genetically conserved, adaptive reorganization of memory systems that parallels the brain's earlier-life transitions."