I'm like an old-fashioned coffee maker

I have no filter.

But that's usually for my mouth.

New research has shown that age-related memory loss tied to slip in filtering information quickly and forming short-term memories.

It's pretty interesting stuff.

Scientists have identified a way in which the brain’s ability to process information diminishes with age, and shown that this break down contributes to the decreased ability to form memories that is associated with normal aging.

The finding, reported in the current online early edition of “Proceedings of the National Academy of Science,” fuels the researchers’ efforts, they say, to explore strategies for enhancing brain function in the healthy aging population, through mental training exercises and pharmaceutical treatments.

The research, conducted by University of California, San Francisco and University of California, Berkeley scientists, builds on the team’s seminal 2005 discovery (“Nature Neuroscience,” October 2005) that the brain’s capacity to ignore irrelevant information diminishes with age.

The capacity to ignore irrelevant information -- such as most of the faces in a crowded room when one is looking for a long-lost friend – and to enhance pertinent information -- such as the face of a new acquaintance met during the search for the old friend – is key to memory formation. This process is known as top-down modulation.

(snip)

The new study, involving the same visual memory test used in the previous research, revealed that both brain processes – the capacity to ignore irrelevant information and the ability to process information quickly -- diminished with age and, in fact, worked in tandem. The participants had trouble suppressing unnecessary information, but only because the speed with which they processed the irrelevant data decreased. Significantly, the slow down in processing time happened only in the very early stages of visual processing -- within 200 milliseconds.

“The study showed that the brains of older adults have a deficit in suppressing irrelevant information during visual working memory encoding, but only in the first tenth to two tenths of a second of visual processing,” says the lead author of the study, Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurology, a member of the UCSF Memory and Aging Center and director of the UCSF Neuroscience Imaging Center.

Oh, and the researcher is a total hottie.