Through rose-colored glasses
Grumpy old men? Hollywood’s version of old age may be more fancy than fact. The older we get, a new study finds, the more positive our memories are likely to be.
Call it the rose-colored glasses phenomenon of aging. When researchers at Duke University showed young and elderly volunteers a series of 180 positive and negative pictures and then asked them to recall what they’d seen a half an hour later, the older participants were less likely than their younger counterparts to remember the negative images. The average age of the young volunteers was 25, compared to 70 in the older group.
The difference was more than simply a matter of accentuating the positive. Using magnetic resonance imaging to take live pictures of brain activity during the experiment, the researchers turned up crucial age-related variations in circuitry. Older brains showed less interaction between a region called the amygdala, which detects emotions, and the hippocampus, the center for learning and memory. At the same time, older brains showed stronger connections between the hippocampus and a part of the brain called the dorsolateral frontal cortex, which is involved in higher thinking processes.
These differences suggest that older brains use thinking rather than feeling to form and store memories. “Seniors’ brains actually work differently than younger individuals,” explained Florin Dolcos, PhD, an assistant professor of psychiatry and neuroscience in Duke University’s Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry and a member of the faculty of the University of Alberta in Canada. “They have somehow trained their brains so that they’re less affected both during and after an upsetting event.”
Other research confirms the rose-colored glasses phenomenon. Laura L. Cartensen, PhD, the director of the Stanford University Center on Longevity, has studied how young, middle-aged, and older volunteers remember images viewed on a computer screen. The youngest participants recalled positive and negative pictures equally well. Those 40 to 55 showed a bias toward rosier images. Among those over 55, Cartensen found a “whopping difference” in favor of the positive pictures. Dr. Cartensen speculates that as we get older, we’re motivated to form a more positive view of life. Few of us, it seems, really want to end up grumpy old men and women.
The findings provide new insights into how we remember. They may also help lead researchers to more effective ways to help older people with age-related memory loss.
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