The Aging Brain Is Less Quick, But More Shrewd

or baby-boomers, there is both good news and bad news about the cognitive health of the aging brain.

Brain researcher Gary Small from UCLA conveys the bad news first: "Reaction time is slower," he says. "It takes us longer to learn new information. Sometimes it takes us longer to retrieve information, so we have that tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon — where you almost have that word or that thought. That's typical of the middle-age brain."

As we age, our ability to multi-task diminishes. "We're quick, but we're sloppy when we're in middle-age. We make more errors when we're in middle age," says Small.


March 1, 2010 via NPR

The Teen Brain: It's Just Not Grown Up Yet

When adolescence hit Frances Jensen's sons, she often found herself wondering, like all parents of teenagers, "What were you thinking?"

"It's a resounding mantra of parents and teachers," says Jensen, who's a pediatric neurologist at Children's Hospital in Boston. [...]

ensen is a Harvard expert on epilepsy, not adolescent brain development. As she coped with her boys' sour moods and their exasperating assumption that somebody else will pick up their dirty clothes, she decided to investigate what neuroscientists are discovering about teenagers' brains that makes them behave that way.


March 1, 2010 via NPR