AGING AND MIND
Going back to college and being an A student does little to ease my feelings about my learning ability at this stage of life. I can't help feeling that I'm at a basic disadvantage because of my age. True, I'm a bit better now. At first, when I read an assignment and didn't absorb it the first time - pure panic. Now I'm able to reassure myself a bit, but I still feel I have to work twice as hard to measure up. I'll be frank, this is the worst fear associated with aging - always being conscious of your mental state. Now when I forget something or miss an appointment, I cannot forget it. The thoughts keep coming: Is this the beginning of senility} Can I really still trust myself 11 know I'm not unusual. Most of us feel that by magic birthday sixty-five we must be mentally worse off. At the back of our minds is the terror of Alzheimer's disease.
This woman is a wonderful student, but success does not touch her fear. She shrugs off A+ work as due to extra effort and misinterprets normal forgetting as mental decline. Her oversensitivity is understandable. From childhood we have been taught to judge old people by a harsher mental standard, seeing evidence of basic confusion in even benign mistakes.
Psychologists Judith Rodin of Yale University and Ellen Langer of Harvard University demonstrated this bias by filming three actors aged twenty, fifty, and seventy reading the same speech. Scattered through the ten-minute monologue were a few comments such as "Yesterday I forgot my keys." People of different ages then watched the film of either the young, middle-aged, or older actor and were asked to write an essay telling what he was like. Those who saw the seventy-year-old frequently described him as forgetful. None of those who had seen the identical words read by the middle-aged person or young adult mentioned poor memory.
Unfortunately, the older people who saw the film were just as likely as the younger viewers to see the seventy-year-old as slipping mentally, and they were even more likely to evaluate him in a negative way.
This is just one of many studies demonstrating that we are primed to look for signs of mental confusion in older people.2 When someone is seventy (or sixty-five, or eighty) we do interpret normal forgetting in an exaggerated, more ominous light. But Rodin and Langer's finding that the victims of this prejudice practice it too is particularly distressing. If older people leap just as readily to misjudge someone their own age, don't they turn the same over-harsh judgments inward? How many people are haunted for days by the idea "I'm getting senile" just because they are over sixty-five and have misplaced their keys?
Beware of self-diagnosing your memory. If you think it has seriously declined, you are probably not right. Psychologist Robin West of the University of Florida and her colleagues gave women ranging in age from sixty-five to ninety a variety of memory tests and also tested their emotional state - their anxiety and depression, their satisfaction with life. The researchers then asked the women how bad or good they felt their memory was: Do you have problems remembering names? Do you remember better than your friends? Do you feel your memory is good or poor?
The women who believed they had a poor memory did just as well as anyone else on the actual memory tests. But they were more fearful and less happy. In this 1984 study, West demonstrated what other psychologists have found: older people are not accurate judges of their memory. They tend to feel their memory is bad not so much when it is bad as when they are feeling bad.
But even if we may not be good at self-diagnosis, isn't it true that as we get older not just our memory but our overall mental sharpness declines? We do gradually lose brain cells. Shouldn't that have an effect on our ability to think? Before looking at the research on memory and aging, let's consider hat more basic question. Do we get less intelligent as the years advance?
*21/159/5*
GENERAL HEALTH
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