While older brains may seem less acute than whippersnapper brains, they apparently have a much better ability to absorb and process information better than the baby brains and can view words, ideas, situations, thoughts, you name it, from a broader context.
Here’s a quote:
Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute [says] “[F]or older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”
Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.
“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”
It reminds me of what someone told me about the Chinese language: Every fluent speaker may understand more or less what is being said, but as the speaker grows older, he or she know more of the nuances and historical references emitting from these words. It’s like having ready metadata in your brain’s language center — or at least that’s how I interpreted it.
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