Aging is associated with cognitive impairment, but there are large individual differences in these declines. One neural measure that is lower in older adults and predicts these individual differences is moment-to-moment brain signal variability. Testing the assumption that GABA should heighten neural variability, we examined whether reduced brain signal variability in older, poorer performing adults could be boosted by increasing GABA pharmacologically. Brain signal variability was estimated using fMRI in 20 young and 24 older healthy human adults during placebo and GABA agonist sessions. As expected, older adults exhibited lower signal variability at placebo, and, crucially, GABA agonism boosted older adults' variability to the levels of young adults. Furthermore, poorer performing older adults experienced a greater increase in variability on drug, suggesting that those with more to gain benefit the most from GABA system potentiation. GABA may thus serve as a core neurochemical target in future work on aging- and cognition-related human brain dynamics.
