January/February 2001
Page 8
Running Out Of Brain Space
There could be a simple reason that people tend to forget things as they grow older: They run out of mental storage space. An article published in the journal Developmental Psychology says age-related memory loss may not be due to a decline in information-processing abilities, as the commonly held theory goes, but rather to limited information-storing space in our brains.
Researchers from the University of California at Riverside examined 778 healthy subjects aged six to 76. The subjects were given tests to assess their working memory, verbal recall, and visual/spatial tasks. In these tests, they were asked to recall information learned recently or to process pieces of information by categorizing them. The researchers found that the subjects' memory-processing ability was not linked to age, but their simple recall abilities were, Reuters reports. Based on the subjects' test scores, the study suggests that our ability to store and retrieve information from memory improves throughout childhood, but peaks at about age 45 and goes downhill from there on. In other words, we have a limited amount of space for storing memories and at a certain point we just run out of room. However, the researchers point out that memory storage capacity varies from person to person, and so declines in recall ability may occur later for some people than others.
From Reuters via S. Brevard (FL) Ostomy Newsletter 8/99, via Inside Out On-line Jan/Feb 2001.
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