The brain, age & creativity

I’m citing this article from today's NY Times, Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain because I like the image, above, by Yarek Waszul, and also it confirms, as I always suspected, that the reason we can’t immediately bring a fact or name to mind as we grow older, is because there’s just so much in there. This is because, the article says, with age we develop a gradual widening of attention, an ability to take in more of the information available to us, and therefore may be distracted by seemingly extraneous points a younger person might overlook.

"Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it's not always clear what information is important, or will become important."

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“It may be that distractibility is not a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard, whose work was cited in the book (Progress in Brain Research), “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

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The article also suggests that creative people exhibit this wide attention span throughout their lives, and that a “reduced ability to filter and set priorities…could contribute to original thinking.”

This explains why, in seventh grade, I was never able to get over Mrs. Kluver’s coiled, movie queen hair and bulbous high-healed shoes to actually concentrate on what she was saying. Obviously I knew what was important even then.