新聞選輯：Aging Brains Aren’t Necessarily Declining Brains

Aging Brains Aren’t Necessarily Declining Brains

November 3, 2014 Aging, Brain Training Software & Brain Games, Cognitive Enhancement, Intelligence,Intelligence Amplification, Longevity, Neuro, Science

By: Angela Gutchess

For years, conventional wisdom held that growing older tends to be bad news for brains. Past behavioral data largely pointed to loss in cognitive – that is, thinking – abilities with age, including poorer memory and greater distractibility. Physical measures of brain structure also showed atrophy, or loss of volume, in many regions with age.
Watching older brains at work

Enter cognitive neuroscience, a subfield of psychology that incorporates methods from neuroscience. It uses measures of brain activity to understand human thought. The emphasis is on how the brain shapes behavior, asking questions like which brain regions help us form accurate memories or what area controls face perception.

Using cognitive neuroscience methods to study aging has unexpectedly revealed that, contrary to previous thought, aging brains remain somewhat malleable and plastic. Plasticity refers to the ability to flexibly recruit different areas of the brain to do different jobs. In contrast to the earlier, largely pessimistic view of aging, neuroimaging studies suggest aging brains can reorganize and change, and not necessarily for the worse....繼續閱讀