ABSTRACT
Adrian Owen, with distinguished colleagues based in Cambridge and Manchester took advantage of an offer by the BBC to sponsor a web-based experiment for a TV programme, Bang Goes the Theory. Interpretations of these demographic data are not straightforward, because all the many factors that contribute to successful aging are tightly intertwined. Widely publicised studies found that when experienced London taxi and bus drivers imagine and describe complex routes they have learned to navigate, they show marked activation of the right hippocampus, an area known to support spatial memory. An inconvenient reality is that older people only experience rapid improvements on very simple tasks such as choice reaction times or easy mental arithmetic. The idea that information can be deliberately and actively organised in memory was a staple of courses run by Classical Roman and Greek teachers of rhetoric who drilled their students to construct mental images of locations.
