Maybe you’re not losing it!

This morning I couldn’t think of the word, “ultrasound.” These lapses seem to occur daily. Neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin maintains that such lapses are not necessarily age-related (I’m 83 as I write this). He says that short-term memory contains the contents of our thoughts right now and is easily disturbed or disrupted by new thoughts or distractions. (For me, sometimes it's panic about my ability to remember the word or name.)

He does concede that our ability to automatically restore the contents of our short-term memory declines slightly with every decade after 30. But he says that age is not the major factor in such memory problems. As a professor, he finds that 20-year-olds make “loads” of short-term memory errors—similar to those of 70-year-olds. The difference is that we old people worry about our lapses. “In the absence of brain disease,” he says, “even the oldest older adults show little or no cognitive or memory decline beyond age 85 and 90, as shown in a 2018 study.”

In fact, according to Levitin, some aspects of our memory actually get better as we age, including our ability to extract patterns and to make accurate predictions. Such improvements are the result of our years of experience. You’re better off having a 70-year-old radiologist reading your X-ray than a more youthful one.

He says we fumble with words and names because of a “generalized cognitive slowing” with age, but that given more time we do just fine. What’s more, we have more information to search through as we struggle to recall something—a condition called “crowdedness.” OK. I like that. My brain is simply too crowded with information to recall words quickly. No worries!

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