Good news for aging brains or why we get older AND mellower.
It turns out that we become MORE emotionally stable as we grow older because our brains gradually reorganizes our emotion system, moving from the amygdala to the pre-frontal cortex, from the more animal brain, center of the automatic fear response, to the the more evolved, conscious thinking brain.
That slow move gives us increased control over our negative emotions and greater accessibility to our positive emotions.
This gradual reorganization of the brain's emotion system may result from older folk responding to accumulating personal experiences by increasingly looking for meaning in life, the researchers propose in the June 14 Journal of Neuroscience.
Evidence that emotional functions improve in older brains "indicates that our ability to register the significance of information is preserved, and even enhanced, as we age," Williams says.
