There’s been a few studies out in the last week or so on ageing, memory, memory loss, and knowledge.
The first sounds pretty obvious, but it showed that those with less memory loss in old age gained more knowledge — this was trying to disentangle the causal relationship with this because memory loss in old age may not be related to a lifetime of collected knowledge.
Another in the older brain was that one of the problems of retrieving memories could be that we have too much knowledge making retrieval of memories harder. So, in this case, not being able to recall memories is not a function of a bad memory but having too much in storage to sift through and making recollection more difficult. That’s my excuse anyhow.
Another piece of research out recently also highlights that forgetting is as much a part of learning as is remembering — simply put, the brain must and should forget a lot of things to remain efficient — what one forgets is more critical rather than forgetting itself. If the brain forgets selectively unimportant information that is no bad thing!
References:
Elliot M. Tucker-Drob, Javier de la Fuente, Ylva Köhncke, Andreas M. Brandmaier, Lars Nyberg, Ulman Lindenberger.
A strong dependency between changes in fluid and crystallized abilities in human cognitive aging.
Science Advances, 2022; 8 (5)
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abj2422
Tarek Amer, Jordana S. Wynn, Lynn Hasher.
Cluttered memory representations shape cognition in old age.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2022;
DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2021.12.002
Tomás J. Ryan, Paul W. Frankland.
Forgetting as a form of adaptive engram cell plasticity.
Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 2022;
DOI: 10.1038/s41583–021–00548–3
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Andy is author of leading brains Review a monthly e-magazine on all things the brain, behaviour, and business.
