Brains Don’t Slow With Age, But They Are More Easily Distracted

The good news, as reported in the Scientific American, is that research conducted at the University of California in San Francisco suggests that our brains do not get slower as we age.  The bad news is that  they do become more easily distracted. Sciam reports that researchers asked two groups—one made up of 19- to 33-year-olds and the other of 60-
to 72-year-olds—to perform a memory task. The researchers used
electroencephalography to record electrical signals from the
participants’ brains in milliseconds during the task. In contrast to
the younger adults,Sciam reports, the older group could not suppress distracting
stimuli during the first 200 milliseconds after exposure. By then, however, the irrelevant
information had interfered with the memory task, making the older group
less accurate overall than the younger group.
Read more in the Scientific American.