Older brains learn differently than young brains

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

Older people show plasticity in white matter, whereas young people showed plasticity in their brain’s cortex:

Individuals varied, but older subjects were just as likely on average as younger ones to make substantial progress in discriminating the small patch’s different texture. But the researchers weren’t just interested in whether learning occurred. They also scanned the brains of the volunteers at the beginning and the end of the week using magnetic resonance imaging, which can indicate plasticity in the cortex, and using diffusion tensor imaging, which can indicate changes in white matter.

…In analyzing the scan results and the learning performance results together, the researchers found several important associations:

For changes in the cortex, younger learners showed significantly more than older learners. For changes in white matter, older learners showed significantly more than younger learners.
In volunteers of both age groups, brain changes occurred only in the sections corresponding with the specific part of the visual field where the patches occurred.

The study produced another curious finding. In looking more deeply at the association between white matter changes and learning performance in the older subjects, the researchers found that they separated into two clearly distinct groups: “good learners” and “poor learners.” In the group that learned very well (their accuracy in discriminating the patch increased by more than 20 percent), members showed a positive association between white matter changes and their improved learning. But among the “poor learner” group (which had a less than 20 percent improvement), the trend was that learning improvement decreased with greater white matter change.

The study doesn’t explain what accounted for why older subjects fell into one group or the other.

The results also don’t definitively explain why white matter plasticity would enable good learners to learn well, although improved signal transmission efficiency is one hypothesis.

Post external references

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    http://neurosciencenews.com/neuroplasticity-aging-learning-1557/
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