Elder people remember more useless facts: Study

New research has discovered that as people age, they tend to remember irrelevant information.

According to a new study from Brown University, older people absorb and process information more readily than younger people. However, this advantage can be a detriment as older people also take in more unnecessary information - clouding their ability to pick out the relevant information.

"It is quite counterintuitive that there is a case in which older individuals learn more than younger individuals," said study author Takeo Watanabe, a psychological scientist at Brown.

Watanabe explained that the flexibility, or plasticity, of people's brains stays intact as they get older, but their ability to learn with age diminishes.

"Plasticity may be kept OK, in contrast with the view of many researchers on aging who have said that the degree of plasticity of older people gets lower," Watanabe told Brown University's David Orenstein. "However, we have found that the stability is problematic. Our learning and memory capability is limited. You don't want older, existing important information that is already stored to be replaced with trivial information."

The study recently published by neuro-scientist Takeo Watanabe along with researchers from the University of California, Riverside and National Yang-Ming University also describes the discovery of how older people's brains mostly involve usage of white matter, while the younger ones record more activity in the gray matter. Scientists hope that elders' learning capability can be improved by consciously avoiding learning unnecessary facts, while admitting that from several points of view the weakening of information filtering systems may come as an advantage, acting out as a form of distributive attention.

Older people also remembered the direction of the dot movement. However, younger people only remembered the dot movement when it was subtle. Researchers noted that they recognized obvious movement, but they ignored it because it seemed insignificant to them, according to the study.