Posts Tagged ‘brain size’
Personality, aging – and brain shrinkage!
Psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis have found an intriguing possibility that personality and brain aging during the golden years may be linked.
Studying MRI images of 79 volunteers between the ages of 44 and 88 — who also had provided personality and demographic data — the researchers found lower volumes of gray matter in the frontal and medial temporal brain regions of volunteers who ranked high in neuroticism traits, compared with higher volumes of gray matter in those who ranked high in conscientious traits…
She notes also that the results could be seen as “the tail wagging the dog.” That is, it is actually brain changes during aging that influence personality.
“Right now, we can’t disentangle those two, but we plan to in the future by conducting ongoing studies of the volunteers over time to note future structural changes,” Head says…
“We assumed that neuroticism would be negatively related to structural volume,” Jackson says. “We really focused on the prefrontal and medial temporal regions because they are the regions where you see the greatest age changes, and they are also seats of attention, emotion and memory. We found that more neurotic individuals had smaller volumes in certain prefrontal and medial temporal parts of the brain than those who were less neurotic, and the opposite pattern was found with conscientiousness…”
Another way of looking at the findings, Head says, is that neuroticism might add an increasing vulnerability to the pathological processes that go on in aging, particularly in Alzheimer’s.
So, if I plucked some bible-quoting, creationist birther from the middle of a Tea Party rendezvous – grabbed him by the neck and gave him a shake – I’d probably hear his brain rattling around inside his kettle, eh?
