Find Out Certain Brain Features That Improve as We Age!

Key mental abilities are found to be improved with aging - surprisingly good news reported by a study at the Georgetown University Medical Center, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

There are three key mental abilities - alerting, orienting, and executive network for governing critical aspects of cognition such as memory, decision making, and self-control, and even navigation, math, language, and reading.

‘Among three key mental abilities � alerting, orienting, and executive network, the latter two are found to be improved with aging. This may help formulate better therapeutics for cognitive disorders. ’

Alerting is characterized by a state of enhanced vigilance and preparedness in order to respond to incoming information. Orienting involves shifting brain resources to a particular location in space. The executive network inhibits distracting or conflicting information, allowing us to focus on what's important.

Key Mental Abilities

The team evaluated these three components of attention and executive function in a group of 702 participants aged 58 to 98 (common age group for cognitive decline).

Earlier studies have constantly shown that advancing age leads to broad declines in our mental abilities. However present study presents a contrasting view of the two key brain functions, which allow us to attend to new information and to focus on what's important in a given situation, can in fact improve in older individuals.

"These results are amazing and have important consequences for how we should view aging. People have widely assumed that attention and executive functions decline with age, despite intriguing hints from some smaller-scale studies that raised questions about these assumptions. But the results from our large study indicate that critical elements of these abilities actually improve during aging, likely because we simply practice these skills throughout our life. This is all the more important because of the rapidly aging population, both in the US and around the world," says the study's senior investigator, Michael T. Ullman, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Neuroscience, and Director of Georgetown's Brain and Language Lab.

The study also anticipates that further research may make it possible to deliberately improve these skills as protection against brain decline in healthy aging and related disorders.

Source: Medindia