Bruce's Smorsasborg

By Bruce Shawkey New study sug­gests that as we get older, wis­dom, not details, is pri­or­it­ized Have you ever walked into a room and for­got­ten why you’re there? Or struggled to recall where you left your keys? These memory lapses aren’t unusual, espe­cially as we age, but a new paper pub­lished this month in the journal Per­spect­ives on Psy­cho­lo­gical Sci­ence sug­gests there may be an over­looked bio­lo­gical reason for it. Research­ers at the Uni­versity of Ari­zona argue that changes in the brain asso­ci­ated with aging aren’t a sign of decline, but a new phase of devel­op­ment that sup­ports per­spect­ive, emo­tional reg­u­la­tion, and passing on know­ledge to the next gen­er­a­tion. “What the goals of an older brain are are quite dif­fer­ent than the goals of a younger brain,” said Fabian-xosé Fernan­dez, a pro­fessor of cog­ni­tion and neural sys­tems at the Uni­versity of Ari­zona and an author on the new research. He said we should think about the aging brain not as a y...