Imagine a closet filled with treasures accumulated during a lifetime of rich experiences. Now, imagine going into that closet to find one specific object.
Only maybe you get distracted by another, more enticing item from your past. Or you find the object you’re seeking but it’s intertwined with six similar items, and withdrawing the one will drag out the entire tangle.
That’s how an old person’s memory works, a new theory claims.
Seniors struggle with memory not because they have trouble remembering things, but because their minds are too overloaded with a lifetime’s worth of memories.
“There’s this prevalent idea that older adults’ memories are kind of impoverished, or they have weak memories that do not contain a lot of information,” says Tarek Amer, a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia and Harvard universities, and lead author of a new paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences that explains this new theory.
“But based on a lot of evidence, we’re actually arguing the opposite. Older adults store too much information, so in a sense, they have a harder time focusing their attention on one piece of target information and exclude all sorts of other distractions,” he adds.
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What happens when we try to locate a memory
When anyone attempts to access a memory, their brain quickly sifts through everything stored in it to find the relevant information, Amer and his colleagues write.
Young people don’t have as much prior knowledge tucked away in their brains, so it’s easier for them to find the memory they’re seeking without being distracted by irrelevant recollections.
But older people have to dig through a huge amount of prior knowledge when looking for a specific memory.
It’s more difficult for older folks to suppress irrelevant reminiscences, and they often pull out a gob of other memories that are stuck to the one they sought, according to behavioral and brain imaging studies cited by the researchers.
“If you know five different people with the same first name — five different Johns, for example — and you’re trying to remember the last name for one of the Johns you know, all the different last names will come to mind and essentially interfere with your ability to remember the last name you’re trying to remember,” Amer says, citing an example.
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Do seniors have an advantage?
While this has been presented as a weakness of the aging mind, Amer says that’s mainly a function of the recall tests that are commonly used in psychology labs to measure memory.
Looked at in another way, this brain clutter actually gives older people an advantage over younger people when it comes to tasks involving creativity or wisdom, Amer shares.
Because of the way memory tests are performed, there are plenty of studies supporting the idea that too much clutter in seniors’ minds causes worse memory performance, he notes.
“What still needs more work to provide more evidence for this theory is the other end, showing that these types of cluttered or enriched memory representations in older adults might be beneficial in tasks we encounter in daily life,” Amer says.
For example, studies have shown that seniors outperform younger adults when asked to perform an “alternate uses task” — a psychological test in which they’re handed a common object like a hammer and asked to come up with outside-the-box uses for it.
“You can think of older adults as having this extra information that allows them to form these broad associations between diverse bits of information,” Amer shares. “Older adults are forming these cluttered memories, but then once it’s actually time to use this extra information they can perform better on these creativity tasks.”
The new theory “makes sense to me,” says Aaron Bonner-Jackson, a neuropsychologist with the Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health.
“Older adults are casting a wider net on whatever they’re trying to do, and that can have good and bad consequences,” he adds.
This helps explain why storytelling is so much fun for older folks, especially when it tends to ramble a bit, Bonner-Jackson shares.
“They may be asked a question and then because they have so many associations, that might trigger an old memory or the name of a person or something they did in the past,” he says. “Reminiscing can be very pleasurable for older people, because they can often make associations with more things.”
It also shows what elderly people can bring to the table, in terms of using their life experience to come up with better solutions to some problems.
“Sometimes they bring in a lot more associations to whatever they’re doing than a younger adult might make, and I think absolutely this could be a source of creativity and wisdom that would give them an advantage,” Bonner-Jackson notes.
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How to improve your memory as you age
The Mayo Clinic offers the following tips to improve your memory as you age:
- Include physical activity in your daily routine: physical activity increases blood flow to your whole body, including your brain. This might help keep your memory sharp.
- Stay mentally active: just as physical activity helps keep your body in shape, mentally stimulating activities help keep your brain in shape — and might keep memory loss at bay.
- Socialize regularly: social interaction helps ward off depression and stress, both of which can contribute to memory loss.
- Get organized: you’re more likely to forget things if your home is cluttered and your notes are in disarray.
- Sleep well: sleep plays an important role in helping you consolidate your memories, so you can recall them down the road.
- Eat a healthy diet: a healthy diet might be as good for your brain as it is for your heart. What you drink counts, too. Too much alcohol can lead to confusion and memory loss. So can drug use.
- Manage chronic conditions: the better you take care of yourself, the better your memory is likely to be. In addition, review your medications with your doctor regularly. Various medications can affect memory.