In other words, we just have to find what we're looking for somewhere in this mess

Too bad we can't find a way to have a kind of Clean House purge for the brain -- you know, a way to get rid of all that stuff that clutters up your head after a certain number of years. I know that the details of C syntax are still in my brain, but they're at the bottom of a dusty pile somewhere, back there behind the memories of the cloud over Negril that looked like a kitten playing, and the layers of the OSI model, and the lyrics to It Sucks to be Me from Avenue Q, and where we've seen Richard Alpert before on Lost, and the other effluvia that gets stuffed into our brains during the course of day-to-day life.

One of the knocks on older workers is that we aren't as quick on our intellectual feet as we used to be and we don't learn as quickly and easily as we used to. But it turns out that having to find storage space in the hard disk of the brain for all that new information doesn't mean we can't do it. It just means that in our quest for organization, we want to find the file cabinet that C is in so that we can store the PHP code in there right next to it. It means that when we're designing a user interface, we want to reach back to that awful client meeting when they pointed out everything we did that didn't work for their users and use that information to design it better now.

We may not access prior information as quickly, nor store new information as quickly, but we seem better able than younger people to utilize what we have in there:

Instead, the research finds, the aging brain is simply taking in more data and trying to sift through a clutter of information, often to its long-term benefit.

The studies are analyzed in a new edition of a neurology book, “Progress in Brain Research.”

Some brains do deteriorate with age. Alzheimer’s disease, for example, strikes 13 percent of Americans 65 and older. But for most aging adults, the authors say, much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. Although that can be frustrating, it is often useful.

“It may be that distractibility is not, in fact, a bad thing,” said Shelley H. Carson, a psychology researcher at Harvard whose work was cited in the book. “It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind.”

For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students. Although the students plow through the texts at a consistent speed regardless of what the out-of-place words mean, older people slow down even more when the words are related to the topic at hand. That indicates that they are not just stumbling over the extra information, but are taking it in and processing it.

When both groups were later asked questions for which the out-of-place words might be answers, the older adults responded much better than the students.

“For the young people, it’s as if the distraction never happened,” said an author of the review, Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute. “But for older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

Hiring managers, take note.