Our memories don’t get worse as we age — just more cluttered, study suggests

Our mem­o­ries do not get worse with age, instead they become more clut­tered, a new study sug­gests. Old­er peo­ple are less focused when stor­ing their mem­o­ries, mean­ing their mem­o­ries become clut­tered with infor­ma­tion that doesn’t mat­ter. Evi­dence shows that this clut­ter can be seen as a pos­i­tive thing, where old­er peo­ple gain enhanced cre­ativ­i­ty as a result of their “enriched mem­o­ries”.

While mem­o­ry becomes more clut­tered as we age, evi­dence sug­gests that old­er peo­ple can also have enhanced cre­ativ­i­ty

Mem­o­ries are a cru­cial part of what makes us who we are. Yet we all know it can become more dif­fi­cult to remem­ber things as we get old­er. From for­get­ting why you came into a room, to not being able to recall details of a spe­cial fam­i­ly event, to for­get­ting famil­iar names.

For­get­ting things can even be a way of defin­ing old age. Many peo­ple will cry some­thing along the lines of “oh my good­ness, I’m get­ting old” when they can’t remem­ber some­thing that had pre­vi­ous­ly been easy to recall.

This for­get­ful­ness as we get old­er is easy to demon­strate but hard­er to explain. An obvi­ous expla­na­tion might be that remem­ber­ing things becomes dif­fi­cult because some­thing changes in the brain that makes it more dif­fi­cult to store infor­ma­tion.

But a paper pub­lished recent­ly in the jour­nal Trends in Cog­ni­tive Sci­ences has pre­sent­ed an alter­na­tive expla­na­tion for this phe­nom­e­non: that our mem­o­ries remain good, but they get clut­tered as we age.

First, it’s impor­tant to under­stand that mem­o­ry isn’t an accu­rate record­ing of life as it hap­pens. Imag­ine if you remem­bered every sin­gle detail of every minute of every hour of every day. It would be over­whelm­ing, and most of the infor­ma­tion you remem­bered would be fair­ly point­less.

If you’re remem­ber­ing what you had for break­fast this morn­ing, is it rel­e­vant to be able to remem­ber the shape of the cloud you could see out­side the win­dow, or the num­ber of times you blinked while you ate? Instead, we attend to dif­fer­ent parts of our envi­ron­ment, and the atten­tion we pay to dif­fer­ent parts of our expe­ri­ence shapes our mem­o­ry.

Reviewing the evidence

The authors of this new study reviewed a range of evi­dence on this top­ic. They sug­gest that instead of a dif­fi­cul­ty in stor­ing mem­o­ries, poor­er mem­o­ry as we get old­er is a result of being less able to focus our atten­tion on rel­e­vant tar­get infor­ma­tion, mean­ing we put too much infor­ma­tion into our mem­o­ry. This is not some­thing we have any con­trol over – it just seems to be a nat­ur­al con­se­quence of age­ing.

Why would focus­ing on too much infor­ma­tion make us worse at remem­ber­ing it? Think of some­thing you do every day in the same way, like brush­ing your teeth. You can prob­a­bly remem­ber whether you brushed your teeth this morn­ing, but can you real­ly remem­ber the dif­fer­ence between the time you brushed your teeth this morn­ing, and the time you brushed them yes­ter­day? Or the day before that? Sit­u­a­tions like brush­ing your teeth are hard to remem­ber as indi­vid­ual events because they have so much in com­mon. They are there­fore easy to con­fuse.

Events which are dis­tinct from one anoth­er are more mem­o­rable. The less events over­lap in terms of their con­tent, the less chance there is to con­fuse one event for anoth­er, or mix up what hap­pened in those dif­fer­ent events. For exam­ple, it’s easy to remem­ber what hap­pened when you took the dog for a walk and what hap­pened when you went swim­ming sep­a­rate­ly. They’re high­ly unlike­ly to be con­fused because they share so lit­tle in com­mon.

So, if old­er peo­ple are less focused when they put things into their mem­o­ries, then their mem­o­ries will be “clut­tered” with infor­ma­tion that doesn’t mat­ter. This clut­ter means there will be more chance for infor­ma­tion from one mem­o­ry to over­lap with infor­ma­tion from anoth­er. This in turn means there will be more chance for mem­o­ries to be con­fused with one anoth­er, mak­ing it hard­er to remem­ber what hap­pened.

A pre­vi­ous study, which was includ­ed in the review, shows this the­o­ry in action. An old­er and a younger group were shown two types of objects (faces and scenes) and told which type of object they would be test­ed on. The old­er adults exhib­it­ed high­er lev­els of brain activ­i­ty when they were shown the irrel­e­vant objects lat­er on. Fur­ther, the more brain activ­i­ty they demon­strat­ed in response to these irrel­e­vant objects, the poor­er their mem­o­ry for the objects they were try­ing to remem­ber.

The review found that not only do old­er adults add clut­ter to their mem­o­ry by tak­ing in too much infor­ma­tion from the envi­ron­ment, but they also accu­mu­late infor­ma­tion from knowl­edge gained over many years. This means old­er peo­ple have more mate­r­i­al to nav­i­gate when try­ing to access a mem­o­ry, which can com­pound the errors we make in mem­o­ry as we age.

But the news isn’t all bad

Accord­ing to the researchers, evi­dence sug­gests that old­er peo­ple demon­strate pre­served, and at times enhanced, cre­ativ­i­ty as a result of their “enriched mem­o­ries”.

When we are faced with a nov­el prob­lem, some­times we need to come up with a cre­ative solu­tion. This can involve bring­ing togeth­er bits of knowl­edge we have that may not be obvi­ous­ly con­nect­ed, or remem­ber­ing sim­i­lar (though not iden­ti­cal) pre­vi­ous expe­ri­ences which might be rel­e­vant.

The “clut­ter” in an old­er person’s mem­o­ry might be a strength in this process. Being able to make con­nec­tions between appar­ent­ly unre­lat­ed mem­o­ries could allow them to find cre­ative solu­tions to prob­lems by draw­ing on a much big­ger range of expe­ri­ence.

So per­haps we can stop see­ing age­ing and the inevitable mem­o­ry decline that comes with it as only a bad thing.