Dear friends ,
I found this article in the NY Times interesting and I hope you
too :
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By NANCY BETH JACKSON
emory lapses in older people may signal that a
mailbox of memory
is full rather than that the brain fails to
process information, a new
study on memory suggests.
"As we get older, we run out of places to store new
information," said Dr.
H. Lee Swanson, a psychologist at the University of
California at Riverside
and the author of the study. "We have a limited amount
of space in our
memory system."
In laboratory studies of 778 people from ages 6 to 76,
Dr. Swanson found
that working memory, also called short-term memory,
peaked at age 45.
"There is nothing magical about 45," he said. "Then,
between 45 and 55,
you see some kind of drop compared to someone 25 to 35,
even if ever so
slight."
Dr. Swanson's findings came as part of a larger study
conducted from
1987 to 1994 to establish a standardized test for
learning disabilities.
For the study, he explored how rapidly and efficiently
associations were
made between new information and old, using the working
memory, which
temporarily processes and records everyday information
like phone
numbers. Some psychologists compare the process to a
computer's
random-access memory, a temporary storage device.
Dr. Swanson tested his subjects, divided almost equally
by sex, on their
ability to recall numbers, organize words into abstract
categories and
remember directions long enough to trace them on an
unmarked maps.
Children and older adults did worse than younger
adults. To assess how
various factors contributed to age-related working
memory performance,
he retested, using cues to improve the memory.
All subjects improved with such aids, but older adults
had to rely more on
the cues, which helped them recall new information that
had not been
stored in long-term memory, comparable to a computer's
hard drive. The
ability to process new information suggested to Dr.
Swanson that it was
not the memory that gave out with age but storage
capacity.
The study was reported this month in Developmental
Psychology, a journal
of the American Psychological Association.
Dr. Swanson emphasized that not everyone experienced a
memory slide
after the mid-40's. Not all "mailboxes" are the same
size and people
organize them differently, he said.
"We have different abilities in what we can store and
some of us are more
efficient in what we can store," he said.
Dr. Timothy Salthouse, a cognitive psychologist at the
Georgia Institute of
Technology and co-author of the book "Adult Development
and Aging,"
said that research into age-related memory was
controversial. "It seems
unlikely that any single study, regardless of its
quality, will be able to
resolve the issue," he said. "We don't know how to
measure storage
capacity."
The sampling at the upper end of Dr. Swanson's study
was too small to
explore what happens to storage and retrieval
capacities beyond the 50's.
The average age of his oldest group was 57 with only a
handful of
participants over 65, but Dr. Robert N. Butler, a
gerontologist and
president of the International Longevity Center in New
York City, found
the study reassuring.
"If so-called memory loss is really a storage problem,"
Dr. Butler said,
"ways might be found to disgorge information no longer
necessary, to make
room for more."
Dr. Robert L. Kahn, co-author of the book "Successful
Aging," based on
the results of a study of aging by the MacArthur
Foundation, agreed that
short-term memory was reduced with age, but he rejected
"the mechanistic
notion that treats the brain as a bunch of shelves and
pigeonholes which
run out of space."
A retired psychology professor, Dr. Kahn said he
preferred the concept of
"the lifelong elasticity of the human brain" with
training and mnemonic
devices used to sharpen memory skills.
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Cheers,
+----| Joao Paulo de Carvalho |------ +
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+--------| Salvador-Bahia-Brazil |------+
