The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science

by Norman Doidge

That we still have some neurogenesis in old age is not to deny that our brains, like our other organs, gradually decline. But even in the midst of this deterioration, the brain undergoes massive plastic reorganization, possibly to adjust for the brain’s losses. Researchers Mellanie Springer and Cheryl Grady of the University of Toronto have shown that as we age, we tend to perform cognitive activities in different lobes of the brain from those we use when we are young. When Springer and Grady’s young subjects, aged fourteen to thirty years, did a variety of cognitive tests, brain scans showed that they performed them largely in their temporal lobes, on the sides of the head, and that the more education they’d had, the more they used these lobes. Subjects over sixty-five years had a different pattern. Brain scans showed that they performed these same cognitive tasks largely in their frontal lobes, and again, the more education they’d had, the more they used the frontal lobes.

we uses differnet lobes for cognitive tasks pre 65 and post 65 temporal/ frontal respectively..