“Middle-aged memory” better than you think

Do you have trouble recalling names? Maybe you forget where you put your keys more than you used to? Perhaps you know someone in their 40s or 50s who does these things and just put it down to “ageing”. These types of changes in memory certainly can happen in middle age but according to a new study it doesn’t necessarily mean that memory declines in middle age, it just changes.

For the new study researchers had 112 healthy adults ranging in age from 19 to 76 were shown a series of faces. The subjects were asked to recall where one of the faces appeared on the screen (left or right) and when it appeared (more or less recently). While the subjects undertook the task, MRI scans were used to measure brain activity.

In older adults, there was greater activity shown in the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved with introspection.

Younger adults did perform better than older adults on the task but the interesting thing was the brain activity that was shown. Younger adults showed increased activity in the visual cortex indicating they were paying greater attention to perceptual details. However, in older adults, there was greater activity shown in the medial prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved with introspection.

What that means is not so much that older adults have worse memory but that their brains pay more attention to different aspects of the event than do younger brains. The older adults are placing greater emphasis on putting the event in context of the rest of their life rather than recalling details. The researchers say that this means that older adults could improve memory by focussing on external rather than internal information meaning that mindfulness meditation might help.