New evidence published online in the January 2009 issue of the journal Psychological Science shows in a brain study that the brains of older women process negative images in a different way than do the brains of younger women.
This is a physical sign that the brain is able to learn to cope with life’s upsets as we age. Not news to most of the older women reading this.
Still it’s a shift from the idea that the brain goes into an inevitable decline as we age.
This new work supports the idea that the brain changes over time. As people learn new things, the brain does in fact rewire itself (a process often referred to as neuroplasticity), giving older people the advantage of practice.
The older brain has had more chance to rewire itself than younger brains have had.
In fact, researchers have long thought that the brains of older people deal with emotions differently. There seems to be a shift in bias so that positive emotions are processed more readily.
In this latest work, Roberto Cabeza, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University and his team put these theories to the test in 30 healthy female subjects – 15 women with an average age of 25, 15 women whose average age was 70.
Subjects were shown photos that had been selected to bring positive, neutral or negative responses.
The subjects were later tested to see which photos they recalled. MRI scans of the subjects’ brains were also conducted to measure the neural activity.
And while both older and younger women remembered negative images, the older women remembered fewer than did their younger counterparts.
The results “fit in with the theory that older adults are down-regulating or somehow suppressing a processing of negative information,” Cabeza says, maybe because the older subjects have been able to adapt to the demands of everyday life. “They may try to emphasize positive information and process less negative information.”
Why? Older people are facing lots of negatives in a society that’s unabashedly youth obsessed. Health may be less vibrant than when they were younger. Friends, relatives and spouses may be ailing or have died. Careers or children disappoint. Dreams have been challenged.
It may be only natural that as a result of dealing with all this, older people have learned to pay less attention to negative events… a sort of protective reaction to the self.
What’s the response to the study?
Continues below…
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How Women’s Brains Adjust To Cope With Life… continued
Paul Sanberg is a neuroscientists who is familiar with the research and is the director of the University of South Florida Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair, explains that our brains rewire themselves over time as you learn.
“Younger people aren’t experienced in the world, they haven’t seen as many negative things in their lives,” Sanberg explains. “They haven’t learned to cope with those things as much.”
Moving forward, further brain study and research could look at the difference between men and women in terms of brain changes. Perhaps studies of middle aged people would help identify just when the change start to happen.
