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 “Older adults are more distractible than younger adults when we look
at any task," neuroscientist Jyoti Mishra, the study’s lead author,
told Reuters Health. "It turns out that, with training, older adults
can surpass younger adults.”
Mishra of the University of California, San Francisco led a team of
investigators who used sounds of varied frequencies to train aging
rats and people to focus on a specific tone and ignore distractions.
The inability to focus on one goal among other options can create
daily challenges for older people, the researchers write.
The 47 older adults who participated in the study, with an average
age of 69, received 12 half-hour training sessions at their homes
over four to six weeks.
Fifteen younger participants, with an average age of 24, did not
receive training.
The sessions required the older participants to focus on a specific
tone from progressively more challenging frequencies, the authors
write in Neuron.
Training led to fewer distraction-related errors, and trainees’
memory and attention spans improved, the researchers write. In
addition, recordings of the participants' brain electric activity
showed reduced responses to the non-target tones.
Similar results were observed in the study of rats, the researchers
write.
As for the humans, older adults first scored 14 percent worse than
the younger participants on a test of distractibility, Mishra said.
After training, the seniors scored 31 percent better than their
untrained younger participants, she said.
“One thing we really learned from the study was how to focus,”
Mishra said. “By focusing the challenge on the distractions and by
making the distractions more difficult, we could really change how
the brain responds to distractions.”
Mishra and her colleagues are doing similar studies with children
diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Those results are not yet published.
“We’re developing the tools and technology to help people keep their
brain sharper, but we’re not saying any such technology is
available,” Mishra said.
But the study authors do appear to have positioned themselves to use
the research in the marketplace, Zachary Shipstead told Reuters
Health.
A cognitive psychologist and professor at Arizona State University
in Phoenix, Shipstead noted that one of the authors, Michael
Merzenich, lists himself on the paper as the president and founder
of Brain Plasticity Institute, Posit Science, which markets
brain-training exercises and partially funded the new study.
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The senior author, Dr. Adam Gazzaley, is listed as the chief science
advisor of Akili Interactive Labs, which sells “electronic
medicine,” “cognitive therapeutics, assessments, and diagnostics
that look and feel like high-quality video games.”
In addition, all four study authors have a patent pending for
“Methods of Suppressing Irrelevant Stimuli, which was inspired by
the research presented” in the current study, the authors
acknowledge.
Shipstead, who was not involved in the study, praised it for raising
worthwhile questions, but cautioned that consumers should be aware
that the questions need more study before the research can be used
as a treatment.
“It’s the kind of research we should be doing,” Shipstead said. “We
should be trying to come up with mental exercises that are going to
help people out.”
Though trainees reduced their distraction-related mistakes, he said,
he questioned whether their improvement transferred to more
meaningful skills.
“The question is did top-down executive function improve,” Shipstead
said. “Is the brain changing in a meaningful way, or are these
changes just specific to the task?”
The study found that trainees increased the number of letters and
numerals they could remember, Mishra said.
“We’re really trying to figure out, what does the training do to the
brain,” she said.
Her advice to aging adults trying to stay sharp: “If you’re paying
attention really hard but being challenged, you’re probably going to
keep a really strong brain.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1r65Pr7 Neuron, online November 20, 2014.
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