It is often believed that old people forget things like names, dates and so on and you couldn't be more right, it's true. For example, older brains have 13% chance to decay and suffer from Alzheimer's disease in the USA.

But after some studies where a group of young people were tested in parallel with a senior group of about 60 years old results didn't showed up as they were expecting.

In a study both groups were asked to read passages that had interruptions with some unexpected phrases or words in no relation whatsoever with the theme. The young group pass trough the text like there was no tomorrow, they weren't distracted at all.
On the other hand, the older group read the text slower when near non topic related words and when the words were related again with the topic.

This because their mind is full of information and when they read something they take out the pieces and analyze the words as they go bye, not just read them. For the young group it didn't even matter what was written there, they just read it as it was.

It seems that after a life of learning a 60 year old person's brain starts to empty some useless (dates, names) information in order to attain new one this making those persons easier to get distracted by things, information, they don't just accept the data, they analyze it.

Therefore older people unlike younger people are able to filter from a tone of information only what they need and later combine it with other new data to solve a problem.

If older people are taking more information from a situation, and they're able to combine it with their comparatively greater store of general knowledge, they're going to have a nice advantage.