Hard work, persistence and practice can help elderly people improve their skills

It is often said that old dogs cannot learn new tricks. But even very old people can keep up with people in their twenties, if they just practise enough. Pensioners can struggle to multi-task, whether picking up the telephone and writing down a message, or remembering a shopping list, because older brains process information more slowly. But in a brain-training game which uses multi-tasking, they did just as well as younger people after practising. The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tracked almost 200,000 people on the brain-training game.