With nootropics, so much of the focus is on enriching the power of the mind while also preventing it from declining later in life. We can’t help but focus on losing cognitive function if we’re investing in keeping our brains healthy; but what if age-related declines weren’t the whole story? Embrace the journey of mental aging with an exploration of its positive aspects and the wisdom it brings.
Age and Focus Boost
It turns out that some things do get better as we age! As we age, new research from Georgetown University Medical Center offers optimism for our cognitive abilities. Embracing aging becomes easier with promising findings. Focus can improve with age, prompting research on nootropics for cognitive health in aging populations. This focus underscores the importance of maintaining brain function over time.
The new study emphasizes the bright side of aging cognition, particularly in terms of attention and focus. It provides optimistic insights into cognitive executive functioning. Focus and attention, vital for executive functions, involve intricate processes across brain regions and neurochemical pathways, facilitating cognitive coordination. These mechanisms orchestrate cognitive processes essential for daily functioning, demonstrating the brain’s remarkable adaptability with age.
Alerting is the ability to respond to sensory input; orienting is the reallocation of brain signals to react to physical changes or threats in the 3D physical environment; and executive inhibition is the ability of the brain to filter the sensory input from what’s important in the given moment versus what is just distraction.
Optimizing Cognitive Aging
Following healthy adults aged 58-98 years old, the study found that it was only the alerting portion which declined with age, while orienting and executive inhibition became better over time! Researchers believe that it’s because all the skills necessary for orienting and executive inhibition can be consciously controlled and improved upon over the course of a lifetime, but alerting isn’t something that can be practiced.
We can do everything in our power to keep our brains healthy now and as we get older, but it’s great to have a new perspective that tells us it’s not always a downward slope when it comes to cognition in the older brain.
Further Reading
Veríssimo, J., Verhaeghen, P., Goldman, N. et al. Evidence that ageing yields improvements as well as declines across attention and executive functions. Nat Hum Behav (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01169-7
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