Older Brains Don't Decline Due To Aging But Slow Down Due To Greater Experience According To New Research

Aging doesn't lead to decline in cognitive abilities as popularly believed. On the contrary, new research in Topics in Cognitive Science argues that older brains may take longer to process ever increasing amounts of knowledge which is misidentified with declining capacity. 

The lead author of the study Dr. Michael Ramscar of the University of Tuebingen, takes a critical look at the measures that are usually thought to show that our cognitive abilities decline across adulthood. Instead of finding evidence of decline, the team discovered that most standard cognitive measures are flawed, confusing increased knowledge for declining capacity.

The researchers used computers programmed as humans to read and learn certain amounts everyday. The computer's performance on cognitive tests was similar to that of a young adult when it read a limited amount. The same computer, however, performed like an older adult when exposed to data that represented a lifetime of experiences.

In other words, the slower performance of the computer was not because of decline in its processing capacity but due to huge growth in the computer's database which require more data to process resulting in more time to process information. 

"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. Ramscar. "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."

"Imagine someone who knows two people's birthdays and can recall them almost perfectly. Would you really want to say that person has a better memory than a person who knows the birthdays of 2000 people, but can 'only' match the right person to the right birthday nine times out of ten?" asks Ramscar.

"It is time we 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," said Topics in Cognitive Science, Editors Wayne Gray and Thomas Hills.