Gray peacemakers

If you were to form a peacemaking panel to solve any violent crisis in the world right now, would you pick a group of 25-year-olds or a group of 70-year-olds?

There are two arrows in each of our lives that we always wish would go in tandem: being older and, hopefully not too far behind, wiser. There are many cultures, including our own, that look to their elders for wisdom. We like to think that their biological journeys have also walked parallel paths in wisdom that could teach the younger ones how to live better lives. The recent study I have come across may give a bit of light into why older people are the likelier source of wisdom and perspective, than younger ones. This light literally comes from within — within the brain.

The title of the study is Effects of Aging on Functional Connectivity of the Amygdala for Subsequent Memory of Negative Pictures A Network Analysis of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Data by Peggy L. St. Jacques, Florin Dolcos, and Roberto Cabeza from Duke University and Duke University Medical Center. It appears in the journal Psychological Science this month. These researchers designed an experiment that could provide a neural basis for why older (mean age 70.23 years) and younger people (mean age 24.8 years) differ in the way they respond to remembering an unpleasant thing. Do older people really have “wiser” brains? Many cultures take it to be so but could “wise” look like inside the brain?

You may think that older people could be “wiser” because they may have already forgotten, at least for the large part, the memories that made them feel so sad, angry or disappointed. That is quite true as there seems to be a waning of memory of negative events as we get older. This does not mean total forgetfulness. In fact, another study I came across showed that positive memories are the ones that are more strongly remembered as we age. Is this sort of selective amnesia part of the “wising” process? Am not sure and the study was silent on that. The scientists also found that the amygdala — that “fiery” little pack of emotions in the human brain — gets more activated in both old and young people when they were asked to remember negative images compared to neutral ones. But even when they both get “emotional,” how do young people and old people differ in the way they respond to negative memories?

The study showed that in older people, this energetic highway of emotions which I like to call the amygdala express, has less active connections with the hippocampus — the one that is responsible for making new memories. These are the memories we act on. The traffic of amygdala signals for older folk is more active through the more “scenic” brain paths that lead to the part (dorsolateral prefrontal cortices) responsible for “motor planning, organization, and regulation.” It is crucial in making sense of information from the senses and the “regulation of intellectual function and action.” It, in fact, pulls the reign on one’s own emotional responses. This could mean that older people, when confronted with a painful memory, scoop from a well of other perspectives, rather than simply emotional, in order to respond. This may also mean they employ a careful weighing of history — maybe those who died in enemy’s hands against those who are still about to die if they will only remember the past in deciding the future?

In younger people, the amygdala express has its own version of the “skyway” to the hippocampus and less activity in the departments that weigh the consequences of emotional responses. Younger people are more likely to go all out on their emotional responses from recent pain and tragedy. This may explain why younger people exhibit more thirst for immediate revenge. I guess this is also why it is good that there are no 25-year-old generals.

Gray eminences have always dominated the human face of most peacemaking efforts. Now that we have been offered a glimpse into their brains, I now understand better why peace is mostly crafted by the old for the young.

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