During my annual “wellness visit” last week at my local clinic, I was a bit taken aback when the nurse who was checking me in suddenly threw a cognitive curveball at me: “I’m going to say three words that I want you to remember,” he instructed. “Banana, sunrise, chair.”
“Um, OK,” I replied, momentarily vexed by the unexpected test and quickly attempting to lodge the word sequence into my foggy memory banks. Banana, sunrise, chair. Banana, sunrise, chair. Banana, sunrise, chair.
He then pulled a piece of paper out of the cabinet above his desk and laid it in front of me. “Now I want you to draw a clock,” he said.
The circle was already printed, which resolved the question of what type of clock I should illustrate (Alarm clock? Grandfather clock? Digital? Analog?). I merely had to write the 12 numbers in their customary positions.
“Now show where the hands would be at 10:35,” he added.
This did not use up much bandwidth, but it apparently froze something in my brain because when he then asked me to repeat the three words, I found myself at a loss. “Um . . . one was ‘banana,’ and . . .” Moments passed. More moments passed. “Oh yeah, ‘chair.’”
While I searched in vain for the final word, he suddenly put his thumb and index finger together to form an O and slowly raised his arm over his head. This completely befuddled me: Why is he stretching?
He repeated the motion twice more, eyebrows raised hopefully, as I stared blankly at him. “You know,” he said finally. “What happens at the beginning of the day?”
“Oh, ‘sunrise!’” I blurted like an overachieving third-grader.
The rest of the checkup was a bit less humbling, but my sense of imminent cognitive collapse lingered until later that day when I happened upon a new study out of Boston University that may explain why such an incident is not unusual for people of a certain age. Our brains, lead study author Wen Wen, PhD, and her research team concluded, are simply too cluttered to function as efficiently as the gray matter of young people.
It’s all about a process known as beta-band oscillation, which apparently governs two key aspects of the brain’s working memory: maintenance and deletion. The maintenance phase focuses on collecting and preserving information, while the deletion phase cleans out old or irrelevant detritus. Each of these processes is key to a sharp working memory, but the researchers found that they play a different role in younger people than they do in older adults.
The study, published in PLOS Biology, compared the working-memory performance of 20 young participants (ages 22–24) with that of 20 seniors (ages 70–81) while monitoring their brain activity. For the younger group, it was the maintenance mechanism — the ability to retain information — that affected their memory, while the older cohort depended upon how well the brain decluttered itself.
“The inability to efficiently remove outdated or irrelevant information creates a bottleneck in working memory,” Wen explains in a statement. “This bottleneck can impact the ability to maintain and process information in subsequent tasks.”
That’s not to say that the brains of the seniors didn’t also display subpar maintenance, Wen adds, but that shortcoming didn’t, by itself, affect their performance on the memory tests. And, because earlier research had focused more on the maintenance phase, these fresh insights may offer a more nuanced approach to cognitive disorders. “For example,” she notes, “noninvasive neuromodulation techniques, which are being explored in our lab, could potentially be used to enhance or restore the deletion functions in working memory by modulating beta-band neural oscillations.”
Wen’s theory makes some sense to this geezer, who can recite with unfailing accuracy such random tidbits as Ty Cobb’s career batting average, the name of the first Super Bowl MVP, and even the town in Pennsylvania where Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in a 1962 NBA game (hint: it wasn’t Philly). There’s just too much useless information in my brain to allow for efficient recall of more important data.
In fact, my gray matter is so full of these sorts of things that I doubt even a thorough neuromodulation of my beta-band oscillations would do much good. And even if some treatment could clear out most of the irrelevant info, there will always be stuff I’ll never want to forget. Like that nurse waving his arm in the air while trying to describe a sunset. That’s a keeper.
