8/15/2013 – 10 Ways We Get Smarter As We Age

As we age, the brain‘s processing speed begins to slow, and memory may sometimes slip. But there are other ways that our mental powers grow as we get older. In the current issue of the journal Psychological Science, researchers report that older people (over 65) showed less variability in their cognitive performance across 100 days of testing than did younger people aged 20 to 31.

Our outlook grows rosier as we get older, as demonstrated by a study published last year in the journal Psychology and Aging. Laura Carstensen, a professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, asked a group of subjects ages 18 to 94 to record their emotional states at five randomly chosen times each day for a one-week period.

Read the full article at Time.