Old is Gold: Why Aging Might Not Mean Losing Your Memory

When we think of aging, the first thing that comes to mind is deteriorating memory. But some elderly people display no signs of aging and have superior memories to their younger peers—we call them “SuperAgers.” Tamar Gefen’s article, "Morphometric and Histologic Substrates of Cingulate Integrity in Elders with Exceptional Memory Capacity" discusses these SuperAgers, who still have the memories of young adults in their 20’s. Gefen contrasts them with those who suffer from Alzheimer’s; those with Alzheimer’s experience impairment in memory functioning in daily operations, while SuperAgers show exceptional memory performance, defying normal trajectories for aging over 80.

Gefen explains an experiment in which healthy 50 year olds and 80 year olds had the thickness of their cortex examined, as well as SuperAgers. It was found that the deterioration was much greater in the brains of the 80 year olds than both the 50 year olds and the SuperAgers. When the brains of the SuperAgers were compared to normal 50 year olds, it was found that the SuperAgers showed even thicker than the younger participants! This cortex thickness implies that there is a biological story linking SuperAgers with their superior memory. 

Science Daily posted a relating article called “Forget about forgetting: Elderly know more, use it better” in January of 2014. He reports on research that finds evidence that the cognitive measures we have relied on (that tell us that our cognitive abilities decline as we age) are unsound. He claims that the reason the elderly have trouble recalling names because there are many more times today than there were years ago, making name recall difficult—especially in those with an already-packed memory. He also argues that memory of the elderly isn’t He says that young adults tend to notice less when words do not go together, indicating that elderly people have greater understanding of language. His principal point is that brains of older people do not get weaker, “on the contrary, they simply know more.” There is just more information they have to process because their age means they have experienced and know more.

declining, but our cognitive tests used to assess memory are fundamentally flawed. For example, one such test requires the participants to pair words in memory such as “up” and “down” or “necktie” and “cracker.” He claims that the reason younger participants perform better when pairing “up” and “down” is that they are more often seen together than “necktie” is with “cracker.”

These articles both question the memory capacity of the elderly, but take different approaches—Gefen distinguishes SuperAgers from all other elderly people as biologically different, while Ramscar makes the point that all elderly are not deteriorating in the way we think, there is simply more information to hold in the brain. I find Gefen’s findings more scientifically sound and ground in research, while Ramscar seems to be working on theory, but he definitely calls into question an interesting way of viewing aging. 

Works Cited:

Gefen, T., Peterson, M., Papastefan, S. T., Martersteck, A., Whitney, K., Rademaker, A., . . . Geula, C. (2015). Morphometric and Histologic Substrates of Cingulate Integrity in Elders with Exceptional Memory Capacity. Journal of Neuroscience, 35(4), 1781-1791. doi:10.1523/jneurosci.2998-14.2015

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/01/140120090415.htm

http://thehoopla.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/young-vs-old.jpg

http://www.timegoesby.net/.a/6a00d8341c85cd53ef0115718714f0970b-pi