Why we forget when we get older and how to cope

A hairdresser treats a patient affected by Alzheimer's in a French residence.GONZALO FUENTES / Reuters

Around the age of 50, when memory begins to fade, people go into worry, when not in crisis.

I forget a lot about things, I never know where I left the keys, I do not get the name of any known actor, and, worst of all, yesterday I forgot the name of a co-worker and I had a hard time hiding my compromised greeting when crossing me with the.

Is it normal, or is it a beginning of Alzheimer's, we wonder uneasily?

Well no, it doesn't have to be Alzheimer's.

Wise nature protects us by hardly inciting concern for losses that we believe to be surmountable and much for those that might not be.

Thus, few are those who when they reach 50 worry about not being able to do physical exercise with the same vitality as at 30, because that is lived as absolutely normal and surmountable.

A normality that no longer seems such when it comes to mental abilities.

With the memory that I had and how I am losing it!

Let's admit it, the whole body ages and loses capacities, the brain too, and there are several causes that we know of why we lose memory with age.

Apart from the fact that the cardiovascular system can lose efficiency and with it the contribution by the blood of the fuel glucose, oxygen and nutrients to the nervous system, the hippocampus, the brain structure that receives information and one of the most important for the formation of memory, loses extensions and connections with other parts of the brain and shrinks over the years.

Likewise, the neurons of the prefrontal cortex, a brain structure involved in attention and reasoning, also lose terminals and connections with other neurons when we get older.

To this we must add the reduction in sleep hours and, above all, in its quality, a brain process necessary to transfer memories from the temporary storage of the hippocampus to the cerebral cortex, where they remain durable and consistent.

Also noteworthy is the decline with age of hormones such as testosterone and estrogens, also involved in the memory process.

There are too many reasons, all natural, for memory to stand and let's not forget.

Reasons that also explain why older people can better remember what happened years ago, when their brain was working well and forming consistent memories, than what happened recently, this morning or yesterday afternoon, when the brain's memory mechanisms are already in place. weakened.

Forgetfulness, many times, is not a loss of memory, but only an inability to access it

So far the bad news.

Now the good ones, and there are at least two.

The first is that forgetting, many times, is not a loss of memory, but only an inability to access it.

We all have the experience that something we do not remember at a time and in a certain situation we can remember later, when we change our place or our mental state.

It is the typical going from the dining room to the kitchen and when you get there wondering confused what have I come here to do?

So the only way to know is to go back to the dining room, where, seeing some candles on the table prepared for a dinner with friends, we remember that we need matches to light them, and they are in the kitchen.

Similarly, the seemingly forgotten name of an actor, a movie, or an old friend, reappears later when we least expect it.

The memory is very dependent on external signals, that is, the place where we are, or states of mind that are not always present when we want to remember.

For this reason, sometimes it is better to be patient and wait for a better moment than to try to wring our minds to remember something when we can't.

The second good news is that, even as we get older, we never forget as much as it seems, as many forgetfulness actually are not.

Theoretically, we can forget anything, even everything we know, but there is something we can never forget: what we never knew.

That's right, because many mental efforts are produced trying in vain to evoke a memory that never was formed, that is, that never existed.

And that happens more frequently in the elderly than in the young, especially due to the weakening of the prefrontal cortex of the brain that makes it difficult for us to pay attention to what interests us.

A certain attention is always necessary to form memories.

When we are young, the mechanisms of attention work very well, almost automatically, so we do not need to make an effort to pay attention so that we get the names of the people who introduce us or the characters of the movie we are seeing.

But when we are older, the ability to pay attention is reduced and if we do not make an effort to conscientiously attend to what interests us, we will not form the memories in the brain that we later want to evoke.

Even when we get older, we never forget as much as it seems, as many forgetfulness are not really.

Therefore, the advice is here also very clear.

When you are introduced to someone for the first time, when you read a novel, when you follow a movie or television series, do your best to pay attention to the details or the names of the characters as soon as possible if you want to remember them later.

If we pay more attention to what really interests us, we will see that even when we are older we still retain the ability to form memories.

Let's forget the typical expression "please remind me of your name, I know you told me, but I have a very bad memory", which may not be true, since what really happened was that, due to lack of interest or because of the Weakness of age, we hardly paid attention when we were introduced to that person.

Paraphrasing the slogan of James Carville, Bill Clinton's advisor in the campaign for the 1992 presidential elections in the United States, we could also say here: It's attention, stupid!

Not memory.

I did not forget it.

Ignacio Morgado Bernal

is Professor of Psychobiology at the Institute of Neuroscience and at the Faculty of Psychology of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Gray matter

is a space that tries to explain, in an accessible way, how the brain creates the mind and controls behavior.

The senses, motivations and feelings, sleep, learning and memory, language and consciousness, as well as their main disorders, will be analyzed in the conviction that knowing how they work is equivalent to knowing ourselves better and increasing our well-being and relationships with other people.

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