Does your memory fail as you age?
I'm 62 years old. Like many of my friends, I forget names that I used to be able to recall effortlessly. When packing my suitcase for a trip. I walk to the bedroom and by the time I get there, I don't remember what I came for. And yet my long-term memories are perfect. I remember the names of my third-grade classmates, the first record album I bought my wedding day.
This is widely understood to be a classic problem of aging. But the problem is not necessarily age-related I've been teaching undergraduates for my entire career and I can prove that even 20-year-olds make short-term memory errors- loads of them. They walk into the wrong classroom; they show up to exams without the required No. 2 pencil; they forget something I just said two minutes before. These are similar to the kinds of things 70-year-olds do.
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 (早老性痴呆症) ." They think," I really need to get more than four hours of sleep." The 70-year-olds observe these same events and worry about their brain health. This is to say that every error of short-term memory doesn't necessarily indicate a biological disorder.
So how do we account for our subjective experience that older adults seem to search for words and names with difficulty? First, there is a generalized cognitive(认知的) slowing with age-but given a little more time, older adults perform just fine. Second, older adults have to search through more memories than younger adults to find the fact or piece of information they're looking for. Your brain becomes crowded with memories and information. It's not that you can't remember-you can -it's just that there is so much more information to sort through.
