That older people seem to have memory problems is a cliche and the object of endless humor. And while many cliches, stereotypes and other random bits of conventional wisdom are at least partially true, I’m not sure this is one of them.
It may be that older adults (60-85) actually have better memories than younger people, but we have to sort through so much more information that the retrieval process becomes an occasional issue.
A study from the the journal Trends in Cognitive Science posits an intriguing theory to bolster this view.
The study suggests that the problem may be brain “clutter,” i.e., older people are trying to form too many associations between too many pieces of information.
Or in a shorthand formulation I prefer, maybe we just know too much.
“It’s not that older adults don’t have enough space to store information,” lead author Tarek Amer said. “There’s just too much information that’s interfering with whatever they’re trying to remember.”
Older adults may have a harder time focusing on one piece of information because irrelevant information can be “stored in the same memory representation as the one that contains the target information,” Amer said.
Anyway, I like this study for two reasons — one, because it has been my experience that my own memory is noticeably better than when I was younger.
Second…oops, I can’t remember the second reason.
(I posted earlier versions of this piece a year ago and two years ago. Please note that I am not referring to of the cases of dementia that beset some older people. That is a separate, much more tragic matter.)
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