The old man is doing visual learning at the brain part different from young people

ByEl Zoid

It is thought that the older age, the brain is aged, and the learning ability declines, which is thought to be because "a plasticity of the brain" decreases with age, but it is thought that despite the elderly young people visually It is clear that people with a good learning effect utilize different parts of the brain with young people.

White matter in the older brain is more plastic than in the younger brain: Nature Communications: Nature Publishing Group
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/141119/ncomms6504/full/ncomms6504.html

Many older brains have plasticity, but in a different place | News from Brown
https://news.brown.edu/articles/2014/11/age

University of TokyoYuko FourAssociate professor and Brown UniversityTakeo WatanabeProfessor's research group showed an abstract texture image with a certain sense to 18 subjects aged 65 to 80 and 21 young people aged 19 to 32. When a part changed I tried to repeat the training that I pressed the button to test whether visual cognitive ability improved.


After training for one week, the elderly group said that there were some people who achieved as good results as young people. The brain change of the subjects was measured by MRI twice, before the start of training and after the end of the training, and as a result, young people are thin layers spreading on the surface of the brain gray matter as visual cognition improvesCerebral cortexOn the other hand, the elderly who showed good results did not show any change in the cerebral cortex, instead there was no neuronal cell body called white matter and a change was seen in only the myelinated nerve fibers Thing. In other words, some elderly people may be improving visual cognition by using different parts from young people.

This is a coronal section of the brain, dark gray is cerebral cortex and light gray is white matter.


Of course, it is impossible to conclude that elderly people are improving their cognitive abilities using white matter immediately from the results of this experiment, but maintaining the learning ability of the brain with a mechanism different from young people at least over the years is It seems that it can say that it can do.