Anybody got some tips on how to combat the onset of senility & stupidity?
Most of the people on this board who are complaining about intelligence are fairly young, and really shouldn’t start bitching until they hit age sixty or so. However, you wanted advice, and not someone telling you that you don’t have a problem.
In The Psychology of Aging Janet Belsky lists a number of methods for preventing memory decline:
1) Stay in good emotional and physical health. As we might expect from our discussion of intelligence, people with heart disease and wide range of other chronic conditions perform particularly poorly on memory tests. The same is true of people in poor emotional health, in particular those who are depressed. Not only do older people who are depressed tend to falsely label their memory as worse, but one symptom of depression in the elderly is memory impairment. Problems with remembering may be so severe they can even be mistaken for Alzheimer’s disease. So the first principle for helping memory in later life is to take care of one’s physical and mental health.
2) Keep mentally stimulated. As is also true of intelligence, older people who are mentally active and intellectually interested do comparatively better on memory tests. This relationship is especially clear in research examining the type of everyday memory alluded to earlier, remembering the main point of a written passage such as a newspaper article or a page in a book. Although most studies find that older people do more poorly on this task than younger people, with well-read intellectual subjects the age difference shrinks or disappears.
Does being skilled verbally help to inoculate people against memory decline? Answers come from a study by Robin West, Thomas Cook, and Kristina Barron in which subjects of different ages were given various tests of everyday memory. These researchers found that scores on a vocabulary test were a more important predictor of memory for a written passage than a person’s age. On the other memory tests, however, age alone was the best predictor of performance. So, as we saw also in Chapter 6, on intelligence, being highly accomplished can overpower changes due to the passing years. However, the impact seems to be specific, limited mainly to the person’s area of expertise.
A variety of memory studies have shown that older people who are expert in an activity—be it pilots asked to read an air traffic control message or elderly bridge players—can do as well as or even outperform the young. However, the advantage expertise offers is often limited to tests measuring that type of memory alone. Although the broader benefit on memory of keeping active is unclear, older people should not despair. There are specific techniques that can generally improve memory in later life (and at any age).
3) Use mnemonic techniques. We all have noticed that some experiences are indelibly embedded in memory (our graduation day or first day at college) whereas others fade. The main characteristic of the episodic events we remember is their meaningful quality. As I suggested in discussing autobiographical memory, when the details of life are unimportant, memory is apt to be poor. Events that are emotionally important are learned and remembered best. So one key to remembering information more easily is to enhance it’s memorability.
[A digression on how to use mnemonic techniques and external memory aids was removed here. If you really want to read it just ask.]
4) Enhance memory self-efficacy. Simply providing information may not be enough, however. To have a better memory, people must believe that change is possible, that older dogs really can learn new tricks. So, it is important to focus on improving memory self-efficacy—the older person’s confidence about being able to improve. As we saw in the search on memory perceptions at the beginning of this chapter, people have a tendency to see loss in this arena of life as an intrinsic irremediable part of growing old. If older adults believe that they are suffering from a hopeless physiological problem, researchers find, they are less motivated to engage in any memory-enhancing technique. In the grip of this perception of irreversible loss, they may give up even trying to remember, ensuring future decline.
I must confess that this self-fulfilling spiral has even affected me. Believing that my memory has gotten worse, this summer, for the first time, I stopped making the effort to remember the names of students in my class. If this problem can affect the most knowledgeable middle-aged adult, what about the typical elderly person bombarded with messages that memory declines with age? How much of the age deficit that psychologists find on memory tests might be reduced simply by working to improve memory self-efficacy?
All citations from the excerpt above were removed because I don’t want to type them out, and you don’t want to read them.
Personally, I keep myself sharp by reading The Haus’ posts and using dictionary.com to translate them into fucking English.  |
