Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Peri-menopausal moment #...I forget

For years we've been told by Science that as we age, we basically get stupid. Cognitive processes slow down, and we lose our minds memory.

A new study shows, however, that we may have been bamboozled, or at least been given exaggerated findings.

The experiment they ran adjusted for the differences in vocabulary between the old folk and the youngsters. It makes complete sense that a seventy year old would have been exposed to a wider variety of words than a twenty year old. Adjusting for the added processes the senior has to go through to retrieve a word from their vast storehouse, the researchers found that the age deficit mostly disappeared.

Hah - take that, you whippersnapper!

Everything we've accumulated in our years of living has to fit inside our heads; no matter how efficient the storage, sooner or later you will run out of space (side note: In this week's episode of Sherlock, he said as much when trying to remember a particular fact - "Full! No room! Didn't save it!").

From now on, I'm using the article's last line as my mantra:

It’s not that I'm slow. It’s that I know so much.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Heh. I saw that, too.

The image I have is of the fellah wheeling the boxed-up Ark of the Covenant into the depths of the vast storage shed at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie.

So when I get chastised for not remembering things, I just mutter, "Top men....Top. Men......."

-Robbo

Sarah said...

I want to be able to defrag my mind.