Older ≠ Foggier

As we age, our memory worsens. Period.

Or does it?

Maybe not. Or at least not in this definitive, over-simplified way.  The story about aging and cognitive decline is not, I am delighted to tell you, a sad and simple saga of dotage and decrepitude.  It is more nuanced, more interesting – and so much more positive – than we previously believed.

Let’s be clear:  What we think we know about aging and memory comes from performance tests conducted in research labs.  (Everything else – like your 90-year-old great aunt Bessie’s ability to remember the Latin names for 300 species of plants – is “anecdotal.”)  But lately some researchers have been pondering the implications of testing older people’s memories in a culture suffused with the belief that old people have poor memories.   They have hypothesized that tests that explicitly feature memory may actually serve to invoke performance deficits in older people.

To explore that idea, a group of researchers compared memory performance in younger and older people under two experimental conditions. In one, the instructions stressed the fact that memory was the focus of the study. The experimenter repeatedly stated that participants were to “remember” as many statements from a list as they could and that “memory” was the key. In the second, instructions were identical except that the experimenter emphasized learning instead of memory. Participants were instructed to “learn” as many statements as they could.

Now GET THIS: Age differences in memory were found when the instructions emphasized memory, but no age differences were observed in the experimental situation that instead emphasized learning.

In a related study, researchers had one group of older people read an article about how older people’s memories were worse than originally thought, and another group read an article about how memory actually improves with age.  Then the two groups took identical memory tests.  Can you guess which group performed significantly better?

Even more interesting to me is the work of Dr. Linda Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and one of the heaviest of the heavy hitters in the field of aging.  She and her colleagues have been studying why and how people remember, and her findings challenge much of this older = foggier refrain.   Dr. Carstensen believes that the emotional content of messages and images greatly affect memory.  She also believes that we remember what we are motivated to remember, and that motivations change with age and across stages of life.

“The human brain does not operate like a computer”, she writes. “It does not process all information evenly…. We see (and I would add, we remember) what matters to us.”

And what matters to us at 50 may not be what mattered to us at 20.  At least let’s hope not.