Our brains are pretty clever at helping us think quickly and efficiently. They use little mental shortcuts that help us respond and make decisions without getting stuck in details. These shortcuts are based on our memories, attention, and processing speed.
As we age, these systems slowly transform, stop working or disappear altogether. And that can affect more of our daily lives than we might think. Here are 12 shortcuts that are often less effective as we age.
Estimating distances while driving or walking
Have you ever stepped off a curb or pulled into a parking spot and thought, “Hmm, that looks closer than I expected”? Judging distances includes factors such as depth perception, peripheral vision and learned experience.
It is frequently done so automatically that younger adults are scarcely aware of it. However, the small changes in visual-spatial skills that may result from aging can cause these instantaneous judgements to go awry.
West Hartford Health says, as we age our ability to judge distance and/or the speed of moving objects may become difficult. As a result, everyday tasks such as driving and walking become more difficult.
Remembering names in social situations instantly
Have you ever bumped into someone you know but just couldn’t recall their name immediately? When we are younger, this process usually kicks in without effort. With age, the hippocampus and memory systems slow down, and one may find it more difficult to retrieve specific information such as names.
Older adults can experience an increase in the frequency of “tip-of-the-tongue” (TOT) states for familiar stimuli, even for well-known faces (Kljajevic et al., 2018).
This is in part due to the hippocampus not functioning as well and connections in memory-related regions becoming less dense (Tsukiura et al., 2011). Sometimes a cue or prompt can help a name to be retrieved.
Spotting patterns in numbers or sequences quickly
Spotting patterns, like which number doesn’t belong or what’s next in a sequence, comes easily to us in our youth. That’s part of fluid intelligence, the ability of the brain to reason fast.
As the years go by, these skills become less sharp as the brain networks responsible for reasoning and flexibility change with age (Kievit et al., 2018; Mitchell et al., 2023). It’s no longer automatic and it requires focus and effort, conscious processing.
Predicting someone’s emotional response at a glance
As young adults, we naturally and quickly recognize people’s facial expressions. A small wrinkle or a tight mouth can tell us how a person feels before they even open their mouth.
However, as we age this unconscious ability starts to slowly diminish. Studies have found that as we age, we become less adept at recognizing certain expressions, especially fear and anger, due to age-related neural decline in the way we process facial information (Murphy & Isaacowitz, 2010).
Grabbing objects mid-fall
The human body reacts to danger before the mind even realizes it. That automatic precision, though, starts to dull with age.
As neural signals slow and muscle control weakens, older adults find themselves reacting just a beat too late. Researchers have long connected this slower reflex to natural changes in motor control and brain function (Seidler, 2009).
Ignoring distractions to focus on a task
Focusing comes naturally when we’re young because our brains quickly ignore irrelevant information. With age, small distractions become harder to ignore.
This difficulty is tied to the prefrontal cortex, which changes as we get older (Prakash, Erickson, Colcombe, Kim, Voss, & Kramer, 2009).
Making split-second moral judgments
Our first instinct about right and wrong usually comes in an instant.
Age can slow the brain’s moral reasoning networks, especially the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. As a result, decisions that once felt automatic may require more reflection (Koenigs et al., 2007).
Estimating time passing accurately
Young individuals typically have an accurate perception of the passage of minutes or hours.
Aging can diminish this ability, causing older adults to over- or underestimate the passing of time. This can make scheduling of tasks more difficult (Riemer et al., 2021).
Recognizing faces in crowds quickly
Spotting a friend among strangers happens almost instantly when we’re young. As the fusiform gyrus ages, facial recognition slows. Familiar faces may take longer to spot, requiring more attention (Shah et al., 2020).
Learning new tech intuitively
Younger adults can often try out a new app, gadget or software and use it without instruction, learning it by trial and error. Older adults, by contrast, more often require step-by-step guidance, as the implicit shortcuts and efficiencies for learning an interface that work well for younger adults are less accessible as we age.
It is not that older adults are less intelligent per se, but rather have a diminished capacity for the fast procedural learning loops required for efficient trial-and-error learning (Benge et al., 2023).
Estimating quantities without counting
Adults of young age can easily look at a small amount of items and have an instant sense of the total number in it. The visual mechanism that allows for such an immediate recognition, called subitizing, diminishes as we get older.
This forces elderly people to use other techniques such as counting, or other methods of estimation. The speed of recognizing the amount declines with time, as the brain becomes less precise in its visual estimates (Cowan et al., 2015).
Reacting instinctively in emergencies
Split-second judgments such as dodging a falling object or braking just in time are the result of reflex pathways established through repetition.
Reflexes become slower with age and healthy older adults will exhibit a slight hesitation. Reaction time research indicates an increase with age which can impact safety in daily life, from driving to activities of daily living at home (Yordanova et al., 2020).