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It is said by scientists that there is a part of the brain known as the reticular activating system (RAS) which is located in the brain stem and is believed to play an important role in many functions such as sleep, behavioural motivation, breathing, the beating of the heart and as a filter for the conscious and sub conscious minds. Research also suggests that “old brains have a better chance than new brains of learning what to consider relevant and then bringing it to the forefront of thinking. New brains tend to consider everything, with little consideration for relevancy. The older and more experienced brain, due to being trained by its experience, filters-out all information from our senses that it thinks is presently unnecessary” Researchers from Oxford university state that from experiments they have conducted that though younger brains may learn more rapidly, older brains may store information more efficiently. This is due to younger brains have more silent neurons in the brain which are activated only when presented with new information but because of this the silent neurons do not release chemical signals to transmit information to the next neuron making the brain less facilitating when dealing with information, whereas in older brains researches found fewer silent synapses thought to have been exhausted, so there were less hurdles for the information to pass through and that “in older brains neurons have to reuse the un-silenced synapses which produce increased amounts of neurotransmitters It might be that this is the reason infants are able to store new information better, such as language”
