Derek Burnett
Derek Burnett is a Contributing Writer at Bottom Line Personal, where he writes frequently on health and wellness. He is also a contributing editor with Reader’s Digest magazine.
Have you heard the one about old Joe, who’s telling his friend Frank about the memory pills his doctor has prescribed? Unfortunately, Joe has forgotten the name of the pills. “What’s that flower that’s so popular?” he asks Frank.
“I don’t know. A daisy?”
“No, that’s not it.”
“A rose?”
“Yeah, that’s it. Hey, Rose, what’s the name of those memory pills I’m taking?”
Such jokes exist in our society as a form of coping with the idea that if we live long enough, we’re likely to lose some of our ability to remember to age-related memory loss. Even as we joke, many of us are silently asking ourselves, “Is my forgetting normal, or something more serious? How will I know if my memory loss crosses that line from something to joke about to something frightening?”
Obviously, we don’t all age at the same rate, nor do our brains. But researchers have discovered general patterns in how age-related memory loss changes our cognition changes throughout our adult lives. Understanding what’s broadly considered normal for someone your age may help relieve some of the anxiety you might feel about your brain as it ages.
During your 20s…This is the decade in which your cognitive prowess is at its peak. Reasoning, problem-solving, processing incoming data, and learning and retaining new information is better than in your teen years and better than it will ever be again. Enjoy.
During your 30s…Those hyper-acute abilities to learn, process, think, and reason begin to taper off slightly. You’re still sharp, just not as sharp as in your 20s. However, one aspect of cognition is now even better than it was last decade…your working memory, or your ability to quickly call up information.
During your 40s…Your memory and cognition are still going strong, although your reasoning skills slow slightly during this decade, as does your ability to multi-task. Remembering new information becomes slightly more difficult.
During your 50s…You begin to experience some mild forgetfulness. While you’re certainly capable of learning new information, your memory is not as sharp as it once was, and your cognitive processing ability slows. On the other hand, you’re better than ever at recalling factual information and vocabulary.
During your 60s…The processing and memory skills that began to decline in your 50s continue to diminish gradually, but the vocabulary and factual recall abilities hold steady.
During your 70s…Working memory (also called short-term memory) noticeably declines, and it becomes more difficult for you to call up factual information. During this decade, you also find it harder to grasp complex concepts or engage with abstract topics. This is also the decade in which your risk of dementia rises significantly.
During your 80s…Both short-term and long-term memory are compromised, and it even becomes more difficult to come up with words and names that you use on a daily basis. By the time you reach the age of 85, you have a one-in-three chance of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
When people are in their 20s and 30s, they easily laugh off embarrassing memory lapses. But for many of us, once we reach middle age, each time we spend two minutes looking for our glasses only to find we’ve been holding them the whole time, we begin an unhealthy internal dialogue…Does this mean I’m declining? Is it a sign of dementia?
As a general rule of thumb, a moment of forgetfulness is part of normal aging unless it’s…
It helps to imagine some different scenarios. For example, suppose your friend moves to a new home in a nearby town with which you’re mostly unfamiliar. He gives you an address and a set of directions, but on the way there you blow it and get lost. You tell yourself that in your younger years, you’d have had no problem navigating to the new address. Is this a sign of dementia? No, it’s part of normal age-related cognitive decline. But now imagine that your friend has not moved and is still at the same local address where you’ve been visiting for decades, but you get lost on your way to his house. That’s something to bring up with your doctor.
Imagine you open your pill box one morning and discover that yesterday’s pills are still there…you forgot to take them. Is this cause for alarm? No, unless this has been happening frequently and appears to be worsening. The same is true of things like missed bills…forgetting to pay your water bill one month is not a sign of dementia, but forgetting so often that you have a pile of overdue bills probably signals a problem.
Imagine you’re having a conversation with a good friend and you want to reminisce about an incident involving a mutual friend who moved away from the area several years ago. Unfortunately, you can’t come up with her name. Why not? The three of you used to hang out regularly. Should you panic? No. You haven’t used the name in months or even years, so it’s typical for the aging brain to have some trouble recalling it. What would be alarming would be if, in conversation with your friend, you couldn’t remember your own daughter’s name.
Imagine it’s Monday afternoon and you and your spouse are having dinner with friends, who ask what you did over the weekend. For some reason, you draw a blank and can’t come up with how you’ve just spent the last couple of days. Your spouse nudges, “Remember, we went out for brunch…?” “Oh, yeah,” you say, “and then we went to the car show!” With that cue from your spouse, it all came back to you. That’s very different from a scenario in which no amount of clues or reminders could help you recover the memory of how you’d just spent the weekend. That kind of forgetfulness should be discussed with your doctor.
Imagine you go to use your trusty old laptop but can’t remember where you’ve put it. After 10 minutes of searching, you find it in the car where you left it. That’s an annoying, maybe even embarrassing, lapse, but nevertheless a normal one. But now imagine that after you find the laptop, you set it on the desk only to find that you can’t remember how to turn it on. That inability to perform an everyday, habitual function is a serious lapse that may indicate a problem beyond normal age-related memory loss.
