Posted on 01/20/2014 2:51:32 PM PST by Sir Napsalot
The brains of older people only appear to slow down because they have so much information to compute, much like a full-up hard drive, scientists believe.
Older people do not decline mentally with age, it just takes them longer to recall facts because they have more information in their brains, scientists believe.
Much like a computer struggles as the hard drive gets full up, so to (sic) do humans take longer to access information, it has been suggested.
Researchers say this slowing down it is not the same as cognitive decline.
“The human brain works slower in old age,” said Dr. Michael Ramscar, “but only because we have stored more information over time
“The brains of older people do not get weak. On the contrary, they simply know more.”
A team at Tübingen University in Germany programmed a computer to read a certain amount each day and learn new words and commands.
When the researchers let a computer “read” only so much, its performance on cognitive tests resembled that of a young adult.
But if the same computer was exposed to the experiences we might encounter over a lifetime – with reading simulated over decades – its performance now looked like that of an older adult.
Often it was slower, but not because its processing capacity had declined. Rather, increased “experience” had caused the computer’s database to grow, giving it more data to process – which takes time.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Amen to your post!
I swiped it but it does have meaning to me.
Because of my need to read history in Wikipedia, if this is true, I wont be able to figure out where my bathroom is in a few years.
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