Aging Memories May Not Be 'Worse', Just 'Different'

A study in Nature Communications suggests that the process of memory as one ages is different rather than worse, reports ScienceDaily . Researchers analyzed the brain activity of older people via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans as they watched an eight-minute film. Their brains were recognizing, interpreting, and categorizing events in the movies, which often involves marking boundaries where one event ends and another starts. What constitutes a boundary is consistent among people, and the fMRI results — which measure changes in blood flow and oxygen to highlight brain activity — showed older adults had similarly higher activity as a control group at the boundaries of events. "In some areas, activity goes down and, in some, it actually goes up," said Washington University in St. Louis Professor Zachariah Reagh. Much of the activity is concentrated in the posterior medial network, which is heavily involved in memory, and representing context and situational awareness. In older adults, activity in the medial prefrontal cortex was ramped up. "What might be happening is as older adults lose some responsiveness in posterior parts of the brain, they may be shifting away from the more detailed contextual information," Reagh suggested, adding that as activity levels increase in the anterior regions, "things might become more schematic."