Taking longer to dredge up a phone number from your memory bank or put a name to a face may be frustrating, but it usually doesn’t mean your mental abilities are slipping. In fact, it may mean just the opposite – you have so much data in “storage” that it takes longer to search through bulging memory banks to come up with a specific piece of information.
Even though some brains do deteriorate with age, researchers are beginning to believe that older brains widen their focus of attention, paying more attention to individual pieces of data. Although it can be frustrating and sometimes frightening to people who wonder if they’re developing Alzheimer’s, it can also be useful. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind,” said Shelley Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard.
In studies, both older people and college students were asked to read material that was interrupted with unexpected words and phrases. The students worked through the text at a consistent speed, not slowing when they encountered the out-of-place words. But older people slowed when they encountered unexpected words and were even slower when the words were related to the topic they were reading. That means that older people weren’t just blundering through the additional information, but were actually processing it, say researchers. Later, the older adults were better able to respond to questions about the out-of-place material than the younger adults.
“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened, said Lynn Hasher, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. “But for the older adults, because they’re retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’re soaked up from one situation to another.
“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” said Hasher. “This characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”
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