Sources Contact Advanced Search Tutorials

An Interest In:

Web News this Week

Search Archive

Some of Our Sources

View All Sources

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

January 11, 2020 03:30 am

Some Aspects of Memory Get Better As We Age

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece for The New York Times, written by neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin: Short-term memory contains the contents of your thoughts right now, including what you intend to do in the next few seconds. It's doing some mental arithmetic, thinking about what you'll say next in a conversation or walking to the hall closet with the intention of getting a pair of gloves. Short-term memory is easily disturbed or disrupted. It depends on your actively paying attention to the items that are in the "next thing to do" file in your mind. You do this by thinking about them, perhaps repeating them over and over again ("I'm going to the closet to get gloves"). But any distraction -- a new thought, someone asking you a question, the telephone ringing -- can disrupt short-term memory. Our ability to automatically restore the contents of the short-term memory declines slightly with every decade after 30. But age is not the major factor so commonly assumed. I've been teaching undergraduates for my entire career and I can attest that even 20-year-olds make short-term memory errors -- loads of them. They walk into the wrong classroom; they show up to exams without the requisite No. 2 pencil; they forget something I just said two minutes before. These are similar to the kinds of things 70-year-olds do. The relevant difference is not age but rather how we describe these events, the stories we tell ourselves about them. Twenty-year-olds don't think, "Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer's." They think, "I've got a lot on my plate right now" or "I really need to get more than four hours of sleep." The 70-year-old observes these same events and worries about her brain health. This is not to say that Alzheimer's- and dementia-related memory impairments are fiction -- they are very real -- but every lapse of short-term memory doesn't necessarily indicate a biological disorder. In the absence of brain disease, even the oldest older adults show little or no cognitive or memory decline beyond age 85 and 90, as shown in a 2018 study. Memory impairment is not inevitable. Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we've had more experience. (This is why computers need to be shown tens of thousands of pictures of traffic lights or cats in order to be able to recognize them). If you're going to get an X-ray, you want a 70-year-old radiologist reading it, not a 30-year-old one.

Slashdot

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

More About this Source Visit Slashdot