Makers of brain training games have made millions peddling the benefits of regaining the brain of your youth—a sharper, sprier mind than your now muddled, worn one. It’s questionable whether the games can actually jog your noggin. But according to psychologists at Harvard and the University of Toronto, it’s also questionable whether you should even want them to.
In a literature review published Tuesday in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, the researchers argue that there's a silver lining to a gracefully aging mind: namely, that it's more creative and better at unconventional problem-solving. Those qualities, the researchers suggest, are more advantageous in the real world than simple quick wits, because they can lead to wiser decisions.
“It is no surprise then that age-related deficits often observed on laboratory-based tasks do not always extend to everyday life, where many healthy older adults are not only high-functioning but also strong contributors to society,” the authors conclude.
Surveying the data on cognitive functioning, the researchers found that age-related declines are a double-edged sword. Young minds excel at tight cognitive control, i.e. regulating processes in the brain in order to focus intently on a specific goal-based task while shutting out distractions. For instance, ignoring the bustling around you while you’re trying to read a book in a crowded coffee shop. Over time, that cognitive control slacks a bit, allowing some distractions and irrelevant information through while your noodle is processing. This can certainly slow things down and cripple performance on tasks that involve memory and attention.
However, the authors also note that such lax processing can sometimes enhance learning and problem solving. For instance, young children who have yet to master cognitive control—and thus aren’t good at homing in on specific information—are particularly good at gleaning patterns across large data sets. That talent is partly why kids can easily sponge up languages and tricky grammatical structures.
In line with this idea, studies have found that older adults are better than their younger peers at putting faces and names together after the information is presented to them as “distractions” during memory experiments. In other words, older adults picked up what seemed like irrelevant information that a controlled mind might have ignored and then used that info to form associations later—an unquestionably useful skill.
Moreover, several studies have found that tight cognitive control can also stifle creativity. In one study, patients who had brain lesions that hindered their cognitive control could outperform healthy adults on so-called “insight problems.” These are creative thinking problems that usually require an “aha!” moment to solve, such as matchstick puzzles. Researchers hypothesize that such uncaged cognitive processing lets loose the opportunity for making broader or unexpected associations and connections. For instance, in another study, older adults beat out their younger peers at a “remote-associates task.” This is a creativity task that "requires participants to produce a fourth word distantly related to word triplets—e.g., ‘space’ for the three words ship, outer, and crawl.”
Taking all the studies together, the authors suggest that an aged mind is a wiser one that makes better decisions by inadvertently bringing relevant and irrelevant information into new contexts. “The extended knowledge or ‘wisdom’ of older adults may support decision-making that relies on prior experience,” they note. “Given that real-world decisions rarely occur in isolation and often depend on past experiences, older adults may be better equipped than young adults to make such decisions.”
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2016. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2016.10.002 (About DOIs).
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