Worldwide, the number of old people is increasing rapidly, so finding ways to keep age-related diseases at bay is an urgent task. Owing to a growing understanding of the processes that underlie ageing, there is hope that, at some time in the future, elderly people will be kept healthy by suppressing the ageing process itself.
One of the most common complaints among healthy older adults relates to a decline in memory performance. This decline has been linked to an inability to ignore irrelevant information when forming memories. In order to ignore distracting information, the brain should act to suppress its responses to distractions, but it has been shown that in older adults there is in fact an increase in brain activity at those times. In a new study published in the April 2010 issue of Elsevier’s Cortex (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex) researchers at the University of California San Francisco have shown that even prior knowledge of an impending distraction does not help to improve the working memory performance of older adults. [continue reading…]
Despite the aches and pains that occur in old age, many older adults maintain a positive outlook, remembering the positive experiences from their past. A new study, reported in the April 2010 issue of Elsevier’s Cortex (http://www.elsevier.com/locate/cortex), reveals that older adults’ ability to remember the past through a positive lens is linked to the way in which the brain processes emotional content. In the older adult brain, there are strong connections between those regions that process emotions and those known to be important for successful formation of memories, particularly when processing positive information. [continue reading…]
