Category: Brain Health

While older brains inevitably decline, their owners automatically adopt strategies to use them more efficiently.

Older people’s minds are more focused and less restless than the young, new research finds.

On top of these advantages, the old suffer less from anxiety, compared with younger adults.

While older brains inevitably decline, their owners automatically adopt strategies to use them more efficiently than the young, scientists have found.

Instead of letting their minds wander, as younger people do, seniors are more motivated to focus.

Dr Paul Dockree, study co-author, said:

“‘Old and absentminded’ is a phrase, which is recognised in common parlance, but it does not hold universal truth.

Our research suggests that older adults can be more focused, less impeded by anxiety and less mentally restless than younger adults.

Importantly, older adults appear to mitigate the negative aspects of cognitive decline by increasing motivation and adopting more efficient strategies to suspend the wandering mind when focus is required.”

For the study, older and younger adults were given a series of cognitive tests.

The results revealed that the minds of younger adults wandered from their task 45 percent of the time, but older adults only wavered 27 percent of the time.

Older adults were also less anxious and depressed and displayed better overall focus.

Ms Catherine Moran, the study’s first author, said:

“Age-related cognitive decline in later life represents a leading cause of disease burden and loss of functional independence.

Despite these challenges, there is a consistent and perhaps, puzzling finding of reduced mind-wandering with advancing age.

We highlight the adaptive strategies and positive qualities adopted by older adults that led to a beneficial reduction in their mind-wandering and equivalent performance with younger adults.

Dissecting the mechanisms underlying different cognitive processes may be important indications of successful ageing.”

The study was published in the journal Psychology and Aging (Moran et al., 2021).

Brain scans examined how men’s and women’s brains were processing oxygen and sugar.

Women’s brains are, on average, around four years younger than men’s, research finds.

It could help explain why women tend to stay sharper with age than men.

Older women typically score better on tests of memory, reasoning and problem solving than older men.

Dr Manu Goyal, the study’s first author, said:

“We’re just starting to understand how various sex-related factors might affect the trajectory of brain aging and how that might influence the vulnerability of the brain to neurodegenerative diseases.

Brain metabolism might help us understand some of the differences we see between men and women as they age.”

For the study, 205 people had scans to examine how their brains were processing oxygen and sugar.

Typically, as people age, less sugar is used for sustaining brain development and maturation.

The results showed that, metabolically, men’s brains were 2.4 years older than their chronological age.

Women’s brains, though, were 3.8 years younger.

Dr Goyal said:

“The average difference in calculated brain age between men and women is significant and reproducible, but it is only a fraction of the difference between any two individuals.

It is stronger than many sex differences that have been reported, but it’s nowhere near as big a difference as some sex differences, such as height.”

The additional youthfulness of women’s brains was even measurable among those in their 20s.

Dr Goyal explained:

“It’s not that men’s brains age faster — they start adulthood about three years older than women, and that persists throughout life.

What we don’t know is what it means.

I think this could mean that the reason women don’t experience as much cognitive decline in later years is because their brains are effectively younger, and we’re currently working on a study to confirm that.”

The study was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Goyal et al., 2019).