Being 67 years old, I have “senior moments” where I cannot remember things. It’s worse when I’m writing and trying to grope for a word to describe sumpin’. Toejam sent me an article that explains why this happens to us old geezers.
The brains of older people only appear to slow down because they have so much information to compute, much like a full-up hard drive, scientists believe.
That’s it. My hard drive is almost full.
Older people do not decline mentally with age, it just takes them longer to recall facts because they have more information in their brains, scientists believe.
My brain is full!
Much like a computer struggles as the hard drive gets full up, so to do humans take longer to access information, it has been suggested.
Researchers say this slowing down it is not the same as cognitive decline.
“The human brain works slower in old age,” said Dr. Michael Ramscar, “but only because we have stored more information over time.
You oughta see me play Trivial Pursuit. I’ve only lost once, and that was against Cindy, who is eight years younger than I am so her brain isn’t as full as mine and she can access some trivial facts faster than I can.
“The brains of older people do not get weak. On the contrary, they simply know more.”
So I guess that makes me a know it all.
A team at Tübingen University in Germany programmed a computer to read a certain amount each day and learn new words and commands.
When the researchers let a computer “read” only so much, its performance on cognitive tests resembled that of a young adult.
But if the same computer was exposed to the experiences we might encounter over a lifetime – with reading simulated over decades – its performance now looked like that of an older adult.
Often it was slower, but not because its processing capacity had declined. Rather, increased “experience” had caused the computer’s database to grow, giving it more data to process – which takes time.
“Imagine someone who knows two people’s birthdays and can recall them almost perfectly.
“Would you really want to say that person has a better memory than a person who knows the birthdays of 2000 people, but can ‘only’ match the right person to the right birthday nine times out of ten?” said Dr Ramscar.
The study provides more than an explanation of why, in the light of all the extra information they have to process, we might expect older brains to seem slower and more forgetful than younger brains.
And researchers say some cognitive tests which are used to study mental capacity may inadvertently favour young people.
A cognitive test called ‘paired associated learning’ invites people to remember a pair of words that are unrelated like ‘necktie’ and ‘cracker.’
Studies have shown that young people are better at this test, but scientists think that older people struggle to remember nonsense pairs – like ‘necktie’ and ‘cracker’ – because they have learned that they never go together.
Sometimes they do, like when you spill cracker crumbs on a necktie.
Prof. Harald Baayen, who heads the Alexander von Humboldt Quantitative Linguistics research group where the work was carried out said: “The fact that older adults find nonsense pairs harder to learn than young adults simply demonstrates older adults’ much better understanding of language.
“They have to make more of an effort to learn unrelated word pairs because, unlike the youngsters, they know a lot about which words don’t belong together.”
Scientists say this could explain why older people struggle to remember unusual first names.
Or names of black people like Tylonolia or Nyquilia.
You can improve performance of a hard drive by running a defrag program which reclaims unused space and reorganizes data to improve performance. We need a defrag program for our brains.
Didn’t Gates tell us, “640K ought to be enough for anybody.”?
At one time, IBM felt the same way in the mainframe world. The first large processor I was trained on, the 3033, came with 1M of RAM. This was back in 1978 where mainframe RAM cost about a million dollars per Meg. It’s really funny that the PC world made the same mistakes with RAM that the mainframe world made 20 years before. We started out with 24 bit addressing with took us up to 2M. Then we went with 32 bit addressing and we talked about “below the line” with was less than 2M, and “above the line” which was more than 2M. About four years before I retired, we went to 64 bit addressing which got us up in the gigabyte range. When I left, we were only using 37 of the 64 bits for addressing storage. In October of this year, I’ll have been retired for ten years. I haven’t kept up with how much storage comes with IBM mainframes, but I know it’s a lot. If I were to go back to work as a sysprog, it would take me 3 to 6 months to get up to speed and I would need my JCL library which prolly no longer exists.
Denny, what amount of computer storage do you think will be available in a home PC in say, 30 years?? I’ve read articles about organic computer storage. WTH is that??
Geriatric defrag!! From your lips to God’s ear!
Well, hell . . .
Paul Simon told us that 40 years ago when he said,
“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school,
it’s a wonder I can think at all.”
Then he went on to say somethin like,
“And though my lack of education ain’t hurt me none,
I can read the writin on the wall.”
I was in a conversation with my wife today about stuff goin on in the world at large. One of the topics was why nobody has taken a shot at Soetoro yet. She said, “‘Cause nobody wants to make him a martyr like MLK.”
Now she has the Asian equivalent of a US high-school education circa 1955 while I have an MA and years of sitting in a Navy classroom learning basic and advanced electronics theory, along with communications systems, leadership and management, logistics, navigation, and a lotta other stuff.
Just goes to prove that though I have a much lengthier and complex formal educational history than she does, her brain works just fine; in other words, advanced education doesn’t necessarily equate directly to greater intelligence. For proof of that, we need look no further than the rogue administration currently running things out of the White House.
Denny, at 67 your drive probably hasn’t been hard in years.
Ouch! That left a mark!
Did ya think all us old guys are running floppy dics…er I meant discs?
BTW, Nice thoughtful comment Ralph.
Defrag and chkdsk /r.
Actually it’s probably better to chkdsk first and then defrag.
I saw this article too, and immediately called my older brother, who is 74, with the good news! He was so thankful, as was my other brother, who is 67. I’m the youngster at 63, but we all perked up a bit. After all, we’ve discovered, we’re victims of excessive education.
While I am loathe to say how much younger I am than Denny (ahem), I do admit that I have already started worrying about all the stuff I have forgotten. Then on a whim I got a crossword app for my tablet. It’s silly, but the endorphin rush I get from the 15 minute exercise of polishing off those puzzles every day made me realize just how much I continue to retain, and leaves my brain all aligned and ordered. I am thinking that by exercising that different part of my brain, I refresh it, defraging it so to speak. Your mileage may vary…
I work the sudoku everyday in the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation.
Recently there was an interview with George Gilder on line at Ricochet. He’s a brilliant guy who has written many books, now quite old, born in 1939. Actually, he is 4 years younger than I am. His speech had the hesitancies that mine has. You lose words temporarily, then catch them up. His interviewer, Peter Robinson, prompted him at least one time.
My mother went on a couple years back. She was a few months shy of 90, and her mind was quick and clear. Her body, however, had completely forsaken her (result of half a century of smokin cigarettes). Memory was sharp and reliable, too.
I’m 73, and my wife is startin to lean on 75, and neither of us have any speech problems . . . but virtually EVERY. GODDAM. DAY. I hafta help her find something she’s misplaced — glasses, keys, purse, earrings, watch, whatever.
And I sometimes find myself on the way to do something without the slightest clue what that something is. What’s most troubling is that I’ll watch an episode of Law & Order or NCIS or Bones, knowing I’ve seen it before, but can’t remember details. Sometimes I even have trouble remembering the plot and denouement, even tho I watched the damned thing only 3 or 4 years ago.
Recently I watched an old black and white movie that I absolutely KNEW I’d watched before and didn’t remember a single scene from it as it played (Bette Davis, The Virgin Queen). Ditto with books I’ve read. And though I spent well over 2 years in Navy classrooms learning basic and advanced electronics theory, I’d bet I can’t find my way through a schematic these days to save my butt.
You don’t need any schematics anymore. You just shoot it down to the FRU (Field Replaceable Unit). We used to joke at IBM that the computer techs would no longer be called Customer Engineers. The new name would be FRUITS (Field Replaceable Unit Install Technicians). They would even have vans stocked with FRUs so another name would be The Man In The Van or The Schmuck In The Truck.
You don’t need to know too much about electronics since IBM’s current mainframes have service processors that tell you what’s wrong and what to replace. My first mainframe that I worked on was the 3033 and I had to go to school for a month to learn how to fix it and that was just product training. The advanced support training was 2.5 months. The next mainframe was the 3081 which required 14 days of school for support training. I taught that class. Product training was done online. Its replacement was the 3090. Three days product training, ten days support training. I taught product training on the 3090. After that, I had my accident and went into software supporting the hardware training. I don’t know how much training they had on the follow on, the 9021, or its replacement the 9672 which is now z Series. The FRUs on the z Series are no longer called cards. They’re called books.
The mainframes got so compact, so powerful, so reliable, and so easy to fix, that IBM was able to drastically reduce the number of CEs needed to maintain the equipment. That meant that they also reduced the number of Field Managers. We had a lot of instructors who got promoted to Field Manager trying to come back to the Ed Center as instructors since their Field Manager slot was going away. Too bad for them since we also drastically reduced the head count at the Ed Center as well. We had two large purges where we lost over 30 instructors in each purge. The group I was in escaped unscathed since all of us could teach multiple products and we spent most of our time in the classroom. I remember other instructors who called our manager a slave driver since we were always teaching. That saved us and allowed us to keep our jobs. By that time, I had carved out my little software empire, and since I was the only programmer supporting hardware education and some customer software classes, which I also taught, I was safe. Just like in the Navy, I got away with a lot of shit being the only person who could do a job. The Ed Center shrank from two floors of classrooms and labs plus a floor of instructor cubicles, to one floor of classrooms, labs, and cubicles. A few years back, they moved hardware education to the plant at Boulder Colorado.
At 84 years old, I wish I would be able to forget the accumulated junk cluttering my mind. I don’t always know instantly the name of the people I meet but I have no problem remembering clearly how dumb some of them have been, and still are. And everyday, it’s becoming harder to remain polite in their presence.
Often, I use so-called old age’s feebleness to get out of family’s duties. I love kids and grand-kids very much but I am so fed up with obligatory yearly Birthday’s cakes. And everyone going “gaga/oh la la!” because I’m still around….and around….and around….and it might last more years than anyone would wish (including me).
Old age isn’t easy to bear with. One needs courage and a bit of effort. My weekly mental exercise is the Monday Night GOC Pun. It helps me to remain sharp and incisive. And to retain my sanity and alertness, I read Denny’s vigorous ranting and his friends’ comments. Sometimes they shock me out of my pants. But they also often put a twinkle in my eyes. As long as one can laugh, one is young. Thank you for the pleasure of your company.
Claudia – We’re all so happy that you are around. You make my day when you outpun, the Monday Pun. Please stay with us for many more years and make sure Doctor Snigger takes good care of you.
Reminds me of this “old” joke:
Two elderly ladies had been friends for many decades. Over the years, they had shared all kinds of activities and adventures. Lately, their activities had become limited to meeting a few times a week to play cards.
One day, they were playing cards when one looked at the other and said, “Now don’t get mad at me… I know we’ve been friends for a long time, but I just can’t think of your name. I’ve thought and thought, but I can’t remember it. Please tell me what your name is.”
Her friend glared at her. For at least three minutes she just stared and glared at her. Finally she said,
“How soon do you need to know?”