Brain halves increase communication to compensate for aging, study finds
The aged brain tends to show more bilateral communication than the young brain. While this finding has been observed many times, it has not been clear whether this phenomena is helpful or harmful and no study has directly manipulated this effect, until now. "This study provides an explicit test of some controversial ideas about how the brain reorganizes as we age," said lead author Simon Davis, PhD. "These results suggest that the aging brain maintains healthy cognitive function by increasing bilateral communication." Simon Davis and colleagues used a brain stimulation technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to modulate brain activity of healthy older adults while they performed a memory task. When researchers applied TMS at a frequency that depressed activity in one memory region in the left hemisphere, communication increased with the same region in the right hemisphere, suggesting the right hemisphere was compensating to help with the ta...