While older brains may seem less acute than whippersnapper brains, they apparently have a much better ability to absorb and process information better than the baby brains and can view words, ideas, situations, thoughts, you name it, from a broader context.

Here’s a quote:

Lynn Hasher, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute [says] “[F]or older adults, because they’ve retained all this extra data, they’re now suddenly the better problem solvers. They can transfer the information they’ve soaked up from one situation to another.”

Such tendencies can yield big advantages in the real world, where it is not always clear what information is important, or will become important. A seemingly irrelevant point or suggestion in a memo can take on new meaning if the original plan changes. Or extra details that stole your attention, like others’ yawning and fidgeting, may help you assess the speaker’s real impact.

“A broad attention span may enable older adults to ultimately know more about a situation and the indirect message of what’s going on than their younger peers,” Dr. Hasher said. “We believe that this characteristic may play a significant role in why we think of older people as wiser.”

It reminds me of what someone told me about the Chinese language: Every fluent speaker may understand more or less what is being said, but as the speaker grows older, he or she know more of the nuances and historical references emitting from these words. It’s like having ready metadata in your brain’s language center — or at least that’s how I interpreted it.

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Grandma Sue just turned 98 on April 7th (although her birth certificate says she was born on May 2, 1910, and she says she was born during Passover that year, which only ran until May 1, 1910, so this is the subject of a whole ‘nother story), and she still plays bridge, listens to the Metropolitan Opera every Saturday morning during the season, reads The New Yorker weekly, and tries to walk 500 steps a day.

At her birthday party Saturday night (incidentally, my grandfather Aaron, her husband, would have turned 100 years old that night, along with Bette Davis), she attributed her longevity to walking and to not eating potato chips because they’re junk. The attendees went briefly silent, realizing that their lust for the fried potato would be the death of them, but anyway…

Grandma can certainly be repetitive (the usual: Have you been eating? Do you have any friends? Are you putting money into the bank?), but in the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that she repeats certain anecdotes to me with regularity.

The most notable one (and the one she has repeated the most lately—although my mind may have just latched onto this one and forgotten some of the others) happened over 90 years ago.

Grandma was seven years old, attending a public school on the Lower East Side. One morning in early November 1917, Grandma’s teacher showed up to Grandma’s second-grade class in a state of euphoria.

“We finally have a homeland!” she told the students. Then she provided an overview of Balfour Declaration, which stated British support for a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

Grandma was terrified. “I didn’t want to be shipped off to the desert. I wanted to stay in New York! I thought they were going to ship all the Jews out there, and I didn’t want to go!”

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My only significant experience with Alzheimer’s Disease was my cousins’ grandmother, who developed it sometime in the early 80s.

When I saw her for the last time in 1989, she and I sat on matching bar stools while she discussed the mess of menstruation. It was this continuous loop about the blood and leaking maxipads and whether I was old enough to have started mine (I was 24).

I nodded, imagining what Steve Reich might have done with this sample.

Over the last couple of years I have been under a lot of stress, and I find myself forgetting things, often within an instant of thinking them. I know this isn’t unusual—if nothing else, I have way more stuff in my brain now than I did, say, at 14. And there seems to be an obsession about this forgetfulness, from video games designed to sharpen older minds to first-person descriptions in The New York Times to study after study touting coffee and exercise as crucial memory boosters.

Nevertheless, certain stories, anecdotes, phone numbers repeat in my brain continually, even as I forget why I am standing in my kitchen holding a crumpled plastic bag.

This has made me wonder: If I were to develop Alzheimer’s and my memories and sense of self started to peel away like so many layers of an onion (obvious metaphor, albeit fitting), which memories would be the last to remain? What would be my parallel to menstruation and bleeding?

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