Aging comes with many worries, often related to health scares and a fear of cognitive decline. From personal experience, I know that even in our early twenties we’re told that our mental prowess has already diminished. However a new study by Ramscar et al (2014) gives hope to those worried about their aging minds!
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In the past, studies have shown that memory not only deteriorates with time, but that the decline begins as early as 45 years old.
With continual medical advances, people are living longer and the average life expectancy in Canada is now 81 years old. This means that research into how brain activity and memory are affected with age is becoming extremely important in our society. Personally, I know that I would like to be able to keep up to date with modern scientific developments, and maybe even learn a third or fourth language when I’m well into my 60’s and 70’s.
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Ramscar’s study takes a different approach to memory than previous works, stating that old models for memory degradation “do not take account of the statistical skew of human experience or the way knowledge increases with experience. As a consequence… [this] paint[s] a misleading picture of cognitive development.” His model/study instead shows that older adults appear to have a worse memory simply because they need to process through more information before finding an answer, causing their responses to be slower. The study also accounts for the fact that fine-detail memory differs with age and makes the claim that older populations “encode less contextual information”, simply because throughout their lives they learn to ignore what they think is useless background information.
I found this study to be extremely exciting and relevant, since the world’s population is becoming more and more top heavy (larger old population then young population). With studies like this, it becomes clear that research on cognitive diseases is extremely important since cognitive abilities remain fairly constant throughout our lives in the absence of disease.
Written by: Andrew Hefford
