Researchers working with rats have found the first solid evidence that still "sharp" older brains store and encode memories differently than younger brains.
This discovery is reported by a Johns Hopkins team in the issue of Nature Neuroscience released online Nov. 13. Should it prove to apply as well to human brains, it could lead eventually to the development of new preventive treatments and therapies based on what healthy older brains are doing, rather than on the less relevant, younger brain model, according to study co-author Michela Gallagher, chair of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins' Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
"We found that aged rats with preserved cognitive abilities are not biologically equivalent to young rats in some of the basic machinery that neurons use to encode and store information in the brain," said Gallagher, who collaborated with Alfredo Kirkwood and Sun Seek Min of Johns Hopkins' Krieger Mind/Brain Institute and Hey-Kyoung Lee, now of the University of Maryland College Park. Lee was a research associate at the Mind/Brain Institute when the research was done.