A Hypothesis About the Aging Brain Takes a Hit
New findings take the shine off the idea that knowledge accumulation as we age could buffer against lost cognitive fluidity
Some potentially bad news on the “boost your brain as you age” front: Expanding our information stores as we get older may not be the buffer against brain aging that researchers had thought.
Young and old humans show opposing patterns in two kinds of thinking ability. One of these is fluid ability, our capacity in the moment to process incoming information, abstract important facets, and apply reasoning. Peaking in our youth, our fluidity tends to falter as we age. As compensation, so it was thought, we get a lot better at another kind of thinking, our crystallized ability. Perhaps not surprisingly, we tend to pick up nuggets of information as we age and store them away, compiling a solid database of items such as vocabulary, factual information, and how to do things we’ve done a lot. Some researchers had hypothesized that this buildup of crystallized ability might be a significant buffer against the loss of fluid thinking.
Welp, maybe not. The authors of a new study say that the idea of accumulated crystallized knowledge as compensation for lost fluidity could be a nonstarter.
