Yes, just as emptying the
memory cache in your (old) PC/Mac/etc. will improve performance; deleting your old
memories will improve the performance of creating new memories. At least that’s
my takeaway from a recent New York Times
article entitled “Older Brain Is Willing, but Too Full.”
Reporter Douglas Quenqua of the NY Times
summarized a recent study revealing this issue by noting that “Learning becomes more difficult as we age
not because we have trouble absorbing new inform.”
His
article goes on to state that “Mice whose brains were genetically modified to
resemble those of adult humans showed no decrease in the ability to make the
strong synaptic connections that enable learning — a surprise to
neuroscientists at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.”
No,
I don’t want to know how they were able to genetically modify mice brains to
resemble human brains…or what happened to those mice that figured out how to escape
the lab.
As those of us with "senior moments" could have told the researchers, the study verified that the
memory issue comes into play during adulthood. These mice were less capable of
weakening connections that already existed, and that made it hard for them to
form robust new long-term memories. “Think of it as writing on a blank piece of
white paper versus a newspaper page,” said the lead author, Joe Z. Tsien. “The
difference is not how dark the pen is,” he said, “but that the newspaper
already has writing on it.”
And here's the image credit for the visual that wonderfully captures the idea at the core of this study <a
href='http://www.123rf.com/photo_13325473_dementia-disease-and-a-loss-of-brain-function-and-losing-memories-as-alzheimers-as-a-medical-health-.html'>lightwise
/
123RF Stock Photo</a>
