Over 50 and Distracted?
Those of us advancing in years may despair that we are becoming ever more easily distracted.
But passing one’s 50th birthday often triggers a burst of creativity unparalleled in a person’s younger years, a study suggests.
The findings may explain the success of older achievers such as British novelist Richard Adams, who published Watership Down at 52 after a career in the Civil Service, and American author Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was 65 when she wrote the first of the Little House on the Prairie books.
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Colonel Harland David Sanders was also 65 when he founded the first of his Kentucky Fried Chicken shops – which have gone on to become a global phenomenon.
Part of the reason older people are seen as having poorer mental abilities than the young is that laboratory tests on mental ability tend to involve highly-focused tasks, which older adults find harder. But these tests often do not mirror real-life situations.
Researchers from the University of Toronto in Canada and Harvard in the US found that being easily distracted, as tests show older people are, can actually be a help with problem-solving and learning new information. Writing in the scientific journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, they looked at results from a host of studies and brain scans.
Being able to focus tightly on information, as some tests demand is known to psychologists as a cognitive control.
But Toronto University researcher Tarek Amer said some tasks benefit from a broad focus of attention – such as creative thinking or using information that was previously considered irrelevant.
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