Why Older Drivers have Difficulty
It may surprise you to know that older driver's actually see more than younger drivers. And that is why they have difficulty driving.
It turns out that as the brain ages, the visual intake gets bigger. Older brains attempt to take in the background of all motion in their field of vision. This makes the brain's ability to focus on relevant movement, important when reacting to driving movements, more difficult.
In a healthy, young person, a brain region called the middle temporal visual area, or MT, actively suppresses often irrelevant background motion so that he or she can concentrate on t
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he more important motions of smaller objects in the foreground.
But this above average motion perception is not something to look forward to as we age. Because the brain is spending its limited resources constantly paying attention to the unimportant motions of background objects, it has a harder time noticing the motions of smaller objects.
Fellow blogger, Dr. Virginia Campbell, recently posted an interview the authors of "Sleights of Mind:
What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions" by Stephen L. Macknik, Susana Martinez-Conde, Sandra Blakeslee. This book is the result of the authors' yearlong, world-wide exploration of magic and how its principles apply to our behavior. Magic tricks fool us because humans have hardwired processes of attention and awareness that are hackable—a good magician uses your mind's own intrinsic properties against you in a form of mental jujitsu.
You can read about the findings in the Journal of Neuroscience.
You learn something new everyday. This changes my perspective on elderly drivers. I would be interested to know if there is a mean age where suppression by the MT significantly drops off. I would also be interested to see how this information may affect cases involving elderly drivers or pedestrians.
Trish
It is interesting and it touches all of us. Someday we will be “old” and our senses dimmed to the point of considering whether driving can be done safely. Moreover, it touches us since we all have older relatives and friends that may reach that point and it would be incumbent on us to make driving recommendations. We can start by having a family doctor assist with these types of decisions.
Safety, not only for the elder, but for the other drivers and passengers and pedestrians.
Timothy R. Titolo