Opinion | Everyone Knows Memory Fails as You Age. But Everyone Is Wrong. - The New York... - 0 views
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This is widely understood to be a classic problem of aging. But as a neuroscientist, I know that the problem is not necessarily age-related.
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But any distraction — a new thought, someone asking you a question, the telephone ringing — can disrupt short-term memory.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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Second, older adults have to search through more memories than do younger adults to find the fact or piece of information they’re looking for. Your brain becomes crowded with memories and information.