Car Headlights

Your brain in drive

Balancing all of these things is one of the hardest parts of driving, an clumsy bundle of tasks that seems unmanageable when you first get behind the wheel, but eventually becomes bruised nature. But with old age they start to become hard again. The problem is, in part, simply one of recollection. “Working memory” is the ability to mentally shifty between several things without totally forgetting any one of them, a capacity that expands in fashionable childhood. According to Earl Miller, a professor of neuroscience at MIT, junior children can, on average, only keep two things in mind at any one time; for adults the tally is usually four to five. After 65, however, working memory starts to balk at shrink, settling eventually back around two. As a result, a 75-year-old driver is something like a praisefully preoccupied 40-year-old driver - someone solely less able to keep track of the myriad tasks driving entails. If he’s vexing to remember the directions to a new grocery store along with what he’s hypothetical to buy there, it’s far harder to remember that the roads are icy.

Source: Boston Globe