DECLUTTERING THE MIND

If you’ve ever gone into a room and forgotten why you went there, or if you have trouble focusing on conversations in bars because there’s too much noise, you’re not alone. But these occurrences will become more frequent as we get older — and we’re all getting older.

Dr. Karen Li is a Concordia professor in the department of psychology and the principal investigator at the Li Laboratory for Adult Development and Cognitive Aging. The lab examines the ways older adults use compensatory strategies to maintain or increase performance in the domains of cognition and motor skills. Li said what causes the aforementioned phenomenon of forgetting is mental clutter, which determines how well we can tune out unnecessary information. We tend to be at our cognitive peak for tuning out distraction between our 20s and 30s; after that, there’s a gradual decline.

“It doesn’t render us unable to function in mid-life,” Li pointed out, “but we become more distractable, and more bothered by outside noise.”

Many scientists observe that this may be because of a loss of efficiency in the frontal regions of the brain, which play a role in attentional control. Li agrees that it’s likely biologically driven, rather than the result of a person’s social environment.

That said, there’s still plenty people can do at a social level to maintain a certain sharpness of focus. In fact, Li’s research, both at the Li Lab and at Concordia’s PERFORM Centre, where the emphasis is on healthy lifestyles, has shown there are plenty of activities that can help. What most of them have in common is that they require people to zero in on a task.

Examples Li brought up are exercising, learning a language, taking a class to acquire a new skill, or anything a person finds fun. She also noted that travelling can be good for the mind, because it forces people to get out of their comfort zone — especially if they’re in a place where people speak another language.

“Finding something that really is motivating makes all the difference,” Li said. “The key is to find something that’s appealing enough to the individual. It could be a social kind of activity; it doesn’t have to be a conventionally cognitive or mental challenge, like doing crossword puzzles.”

Coupled with physical exercise as mild as taking a brisk daily walk, these activities can lead to improvements in cognitive processes. Making a point of getting out of the house and meeting up with friends is a good way to combine them all.

“That kind of conversational dynamic is a cognitive exercise,” explained Li. “You’re following a conversation, maybe with more than one talker at a time, at a shopping mall or café. It’s not trivial to also contend with background noise, because you’re exercising cognitive control when dealing with ambient sound.”

This points to why adults who experience hearing loss often find it difficult to socialize; because it’s more challenging. But Li said there are cognitive benefits to mingling, because participating in conversations allows people to listen attentively and integrate and retain information.

Part of what she’s researching at the PERFORM Centre is the impact hearing loss can have on balance.

In these experiments, she’ll ask participants to stand still and maintain balance when the platform moves suddenly. In some cases, they are asked to simultaneously listen to verbal material to see how a cognitive load alters their stability. Adding background noise is a way to simulate hearing loss while doing the listening task and balancing.

“We think that there are strong connections between hearing, cognition and motor performance,” she said. “The evidence seems to converge on the demand for cognitive capacity, because you don’t have an infinite capacity to attend to all of these things. So often, we’re observing trade-offs between hearing, good balance, and cognitive performance.”

Li’s subjects are usually volunteers from the Montreal area who are keen to participate in healthy aging studies, suggesting a progressively positive attitude toward aging.

“I feel like people are much more aware that mental decline isn’t inevitable,” she concluded, “and that we can be proactive about it.”

Read more at concordia.ca/ research/perform