Where does the amazing memory of "Super Player" come from?

In 2016, Touroutoglou and her colleagues discovered a group of adults over 65 who performed well on memory tests

In this new study, the researchers performed a very challenging memory test on 40 adults with an average age of 67, while using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image their brains

When the participants were in the scanner, the researchers paid close attention to their visual cortex, which is the area of ​​the brain that processes what you see and is particularly sensitive to aging

As we age, this selectivity, so-called neural differentiation, will gradually decrease, and the group of neurons that once mainly responded to human faces will now activate responses to other images

But in the functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, the memory performance of super-elders is no different from that of 25-year-olds, and the visual cortex of their brains maintains the activity pattern of their youth

An important question that researchers still have to answer is, “Does the super-elderly’s brains always have more efficiency than their peers, or, over time, have they developed a mechanism to compensate for the aging of the brain,” Touroutoglou said

Previous studies have shown that training can increase the selectivity of brain regions, which may be a potential intervention that can delay or prevent the decline in neurological differentiation of normal elderly people, making their brains more like super elderly people

Journal Reference :

1. Yuta Katsumi, Joseph M Andreano, Lisa Feldman Barrett, Bradford C Dickerson, Alexandra Touroutoglou.