As we age, our hearing will become worse, not only because of damage to the hair cells that sense sound waves in the inner ear, but also because our brains are no longer good at grabbing keywords from background noise to form meaningful information. This is the conclusion of Canadian scientist Pascal Trembly. In 2020, in a study, she scanned the brains of 32 volunteers aged 19-87. The analysis results show that as you age, the cerebral cortex associated with hearing and language comprehension gradually becomes thinner. Therefore, older people process auditory information fewer brain cells and fewer neural signals from auditory pathways, resulting in lower auditory efficiency in older people than young people.
As we age, the eye's ability to regulate will also decrease, so the elderly will have problems such as difficulty in focusing and poor night vision. The degeneration of the brain will also make us see different colors, and it will be difficult for us to determine the speed and direction of moving objects, and our ability to distinguish details will also decrease. However, organ degeneration can sometimes bring benefits, such as when the body is in pain. In 2020, a study by Spanish neuropsychologist Anna Maria Gonzalez-Rolden showed that people around 67 years old are less sensitive to pain than young people around 21 years old. Brain imaging results show that in the brain of older people, the link between the brain regions that perceive pain and produce negative emotions is weak, while the neural network between the prefrontal cortex and the sensory center is active, which may be the reason why older people are relatively less sensitive to pain.
(Article excerpted from "Singularity Science" 2023 magazine subscription Popular Science Magazine http://www.zazhipu.com/2027353.html)
