Prof. Gagan Wig, prof within the UT city faculty of activity and Brain Sciences, and colleagues examined however brain areas talk to one another to create brain networks and the way these amendment with age.

Prof. Wig says brain networks aren’t unlike social and technological networks; they comprise teams of extremely interactive nodes, and:

“These nodes all communicate with each other in a very large-scale brain network. a substantial quantity of analysis has highlighted however older adults use different brain areas than younger adults once performing a similar tasks.”

He explains that their approach offers an alternate thanks to evaluate the variations between the younger and therefore the older brain that focuses on the brain as a network.

“By finding out the brain as a network, we are, in a sense, adjusting our perspective – resembling examining the patterns that compose constellations of stars rather than focusing on every of the individual stars,” he adds.

The older the brain, the less segregated the sub-networks. For their study, Prof. Wig and colleagues looked at however separate sub-networks of the brain move to control specialized functions.

They found that the older the brain, the less segregated the sub-networks. They conjointly found that less segregation was a lot of powerfully tied to poorer long-term memory, freelance older. Prof. Wig suggests maybe measure the extent of segregation among the brain’s sub-networks might be the way to predict memory decline.

The team examined information from the city period Brain Study. the info they analyzed came from 210 healthy adults aged between twenty and eighty nine who completed assessments of thinking and memory.

The participants conjointly underwent brain scans whereas they were thinking of nothing above all. The brain scans were used as a live of brain property.

To analyze the results, the researchers checked out the brain connections from a network purpose of read. To do this, they used graph theory – a locality of arithmetic that’s used for studying traffic flows, malady spread and social networks, like Facebook.

They found the brain networks within the younger brains attended show numerous connections among the networks that are related to process of specific tasks, and fewer connections that aid communication between networks.

But this distinction was less noticeable within the older brain. Prof. Wig says they found that segregation between brain networks reduced as age increased.