Mental Abilities Improve During Aging, Says Research.

It's long been believed that advancing age leads to broad declines in our mental abilities. Now new research from Georgetown University Medical Center offers surprisingly good news by countering this view.

The findings, published August 19, 2021, in Nature Human Behaviour , show that two key brain functions, which allow us to attend to new information and to focus on what's important in a given situation, can in fact improve in older individuals. These functions underlie critical aspects of cognition such as memory, decision making, and self-control , and even math, language, and reading.