Neuroplasticity After 60: What Still Changes With Age

The claim that adult brains stop changing is false, and the opposite claim — that age is irrelevant — is also false. The honest position sits in between, and it is more interesting than either.

What researchers can measure in older adults is not a single quantity called plasticity, but a set of specific changes: whether a brain region thickens, whether grey matter increases, whether a memory measure improves, and whether those changes hold up against a fair comparison group.

Learning an instrument changes structure

Music training is one of the better-studied examples because it is demanding, measurable, and can be randomly assigned.

In a study published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 134 healthy older adults were randomly assigned to six months of piano instruction or to a musical-culture control class. Those who took piano lessons showed increases in cortical thickness in bilateral auditory brain structures. That is a structural change produced by training in a group that was not selected for being musical.

A separate longitudinal voxel-based morphometry study of 132 healthy older adults found that music interventions enhanced cerebellar grey matter and auditory working memory, even while general age-related brain atrophy continued. This is a useful nuance: a targeted region can grow while the brain as a whole still declines.

Reviews of lifelong musical training, including work comparing 30 older musicians with 30 age-matched non-musicians, report advantages involving the cerebellum and raise the possibility that long-term instrument practice is associated with less age-related decline. Association, in a comparison of people who chose to become musicians, is not the same as a randomised effect.

Bilingualism: real differences, mixed conclusions

Bilingualism is often presented as protection against cognitive decline. The evidence is more qualified than that.

A study comparing neuroplasticity across the lifespan in bilinguals and monolinguals notes directly that evidence for protection against age-related neurocognitive decline is mixed. One relatively consistent finding is that bilingual older adults show greater grey matter volume in regions involved in executive control and language processing. Greater volume in a region is a real, measurable difference. It is not yet the same as proven protection against dementia.

What still works, and what does not

A review of empirical findings from 2017 to 2023 on exercise, learning and environmental enrichment is candid about both sides. It describes the potential for neuroplastic alteration as more limited in the aging brain, while also documenting active research into methods that support plastic remodelling in older adults.

Put together, the evidence supports a specific picture rather than a slogan.

• Learning still changes structure. Randomly assigned training in older adults has produced measurable cortical and grey-matter changes.
• Targeted regions can improve while overall atrophy continues. Local gain and global decline are not contradictory.
• Choice-based studies cannot prove causation. Lifelong musicians differ from non-musicians, but they also differed before they started.
• Transfer is the hard part. A change in an auditory region does not automatically mean better thinking in an unrelated situation.

A reasonable conclusion

For someone over 60, the evidence supports learning something demanding and sticking with it. It does not support the claim that any particular program will prevent cognitive decline. The changes that have been measured are real, regionally specific, and smaller than most marketing implies.

This article is educational and is not medical advice.