11/2/2014 – Older Brains Learn Plenty, but Don’t Filter

In a new study, older learners had retained the mental flexibility needed for a visual perception task but were not as good as younger people at filtering out irrelevant information.

The findings undermine the conventional wisdom that the brains of older people lack flexibility, or “plasticity,” but highlight a different reason why learning may become more difficult as people age: they learn more than they need to.

Read the full article at Futurity.