Why ageing brains lose focus If you're midway through life and wondering why your powers of concentration aren't as sharp as they used to be, a new study could help explain why.Gradual
brain changes beginning in the
middle age cause
older adults to be more easily distracted by irrelevant information and lose focus in busy environments, say Canadian researchers, according to a web report.
"It's known that the older adults are more easily distracted. We think we've found a mechanism in the brain to explain this and generated new insight into when in the lifespan these brain changes begin to occur," said study author Dr Cheryl Grady, a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto.She and her colleagues used the functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) to study the brain function in healthy middle-aged adults. They then compared them to the younger and older adults. The study volunteers were assigned a series of memory
tasks while their brain function was recorded.In younger adults, the
activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (associated with tasks that require concentration) increases when they're doing memory tasks. At the same time, there is decreased activity in the medial
frontal and parietal regions (associated with non-task related activity in a resting state - such as thinking about yourself or monitoring your surroundings).
When middle-aged people do memory tasks, activity in the "daydreaming" medial frontal and parietal regions stays turned on, while activity in the concentration-linked dorsolateral prefrontal cortex declines. This imbalance in brain activity is even more pronounced in people who are 65 year of age and older, the researchers said, which may explain why older adults are less able to tune out irrelevant or distracting information."Our fMRI scanning reveals that the middle age represents the transition between the patterns observed in youth to that found in old age. The see-saw imbalance in the two frontal lobe areas is not as significant as in older adults, but the functional changes are detectable by middle age," Grady said.
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