AGING AND MIND: MEMORY IN ELDER PEOPLE
Unless a person is truly suffering from an illness such as Alzheimer's disease, I am happy to say that brain-cell loss is unlikely to be the reason for not remembering something. You probably can't retrieve the memory you want not because it has been totally lost, but because it never fully got in the first place. Many memory researchers studying aging now believe that the main reason some of us do not remember things as well when we get older is that we simply haven't adequately memorized (or learned) what we want to remember. The problem is not so much getting things out of storage as putting them in.
It isn't so much that our basic ability to learn gets worse past age sixty or seventy; it's often that for a variety of reasons we get out of practice. If we are retired, our bread and butter no longer depend on our mastering that new information or remembering to make those critical calls. So the pressure to keep learning and remembering is off; the training that sharpens memory is no longer there. Suddenly we are aware of forgetting more. A main reason is that we have lost our memorization skills. Having a good memory depends on being able to concentrate and also requires effective memorization techniques.
We all have noticed that some events seem indelibly fixed in our brains while most of life's experiences quickly fade. The main characteristic of the things we always remember is their meaningful quality. Events that are emotionally important are learned the best. The first prerequisite for learning anything well, then, is to make it vivid and emotionally meaningful. When your job depended on remembering a customer's name, there was no problem with making it emotionally important. Now it may help to use special strategies to charge yourself up.
Mnemonic techniques are ways of making things that are hard to remember (such as names) emotionally vivid. Researchers have shown that older people rarely use these special techniques, but usually just rely on rote "memorization" in the memory laboratory. This makes it doubly hard to embed things securely in the brain. If older people are asked to remember something that is already personally meaningful, or if they are taught to use mnemonic strategies to make meaning out of what they are learning, their performance approaches (and sometimes exceeds) that of the twenty-year-olds with whom they are often compared in these laboratory tests.
The memory experiments show other important things. Older subjects do proportionally much better when they are encouraged, not threatened, and when the memory test they are given does not require them to learn and remember something very fast. In other words, if we are frightened and convinced we are doing a poor job, our memories will be worse. We concentrate on our fear and cannot focus on what we want to learn. Being under time pressure adds to the anxiety, and because of the decline in thinking speed it may be impossible for us to store or retrieve the information we want to remember. Finally, the studies show that particularly as we get older, hints or cues to stimulate remembering help tremendously. It is much better to know that a restaurant's name begins with A than to know nothing at all.
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