New York Times Feature “Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain”
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may understand more or less what is being said, but as the speaker grows older, he or she know more of the nuances and historical references emitting from these words.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.
Technorati Tags:
memory, memory token, New York Times, brains, older brains
Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed
The Lucille Conundrum
Lucille was cremated, and her ashes were sent to somewhere in Orange County. “Why Orange County?” I asked my mom.
“I don’t know why Orange County,” my mom said. She repeated the last three words as I did.
“What does it matter?” I heard my dad say in the background.*
I said it didn’t matter, but it was curious. Why did Lucille stay alone in Hemet those last years? Why did she refuse to come back up to Los Angeles? Was she having an affair with my grandfather back in the 1940s, when she was hired to be my mom’s younger sister’s nurse?
It’s odd that the only photo I have of Lucille is this one. My mom is standing at the right with the cute white overcoat (this may have been around the one time I know of when Los Angeles had bona fide snow). She’s about eight-years-old. My aunt Barbara, a year older, looks like she could be Lucille’s daughter, but Lucille looked like a goy version of my Grandma Birdie — tall, thin, minimal chin. This photo was taken of Birdie at Santa Monica beach sometime in the 1930s.
On Thursday, I’m going with my mom and her younger sister Judy to Hemet to go through Lucille’s things for photos and anything else “that has a memory,” as my mom put it.
* * *
* This comment was unsurprising. Back in 1994, Dad failed to tell me my grandfather (his father) had been in the hospital for two weeks and was dying. If I may quote myself…
I missed Rosh Hashanah and my first week of film school classes to attend the Telluride Film Festival Student Program. The following weekend, distracted by my classes and the relentless heat, I made a U-turn into a mini-van and gashed up my head. I didn’t want to worry my grandmother, so I ignored the Post-It note on my desk written in black sharpie that shouted, “Call Grandma and Papa!” until my mother came over for the duffel she had lent me two weeks earlier.
Mom pointed at the note, which by now had a dozen other things scribbled around it, and said, “I’ve been meaning to call Sue myself.”
I dialed. Speaking with a brightness that goes in tandem with guilt, I said, “Hi, Grandma! How are you? How’s Papa?”
“He’s at Cedars,” Grandma stammered. “Didn’t Walter tell you?”
I looked at my mother as I said, “No, he didn’t.” Stupidly, I handed the phone to her. They spoke briefly, a conversation that had no relation whatsoever to the news.
“You didn’t know about Aaron?” Mom said cautiously as she hung up.
“Dad didn’t tell me.”
“He’s been there for almost two weeks,” Mom replied as if the length of Papa’s stay had placed the onus on me to be omniscient. “I’ll make sure that Greg and Jon know, in case they don’t.”
Two days later, my younger brother Jon called, voice cracking, asking if I knew Papa was dying. “No one told me he was even sick. How long have you known?”
I phoned my parents. “What were you guys thinking?” I yelled at Mom, who was unlucky enough to have answered. “After what happened with me?”
“I’m not going to call every goddamn person just because my dad’s dying!” Dad raged in the background, as if three phone calls to his three children would lead down a slippery slope to everybody.
Technorati Tags:
Lucille, memory token, Robyn Weisman, memory, death, conundrum
Why ‘Memory Token’
NYC Subway Tokens
Originally uploaded by photoshoparama
Originally I was going to call this blog If I Had Alzheimer’s.
Then I read a post on Daily Blog Tips called The 7 Characteristics of Good Domain Names that recommended choosing a domain name that is short and easy to remember and spell.
I thought: If I have to think at my keyboard to type “ifihadalzheimers.com,” no one else is going to bother.
So I began thinking of potential two-word domain names that had to do with memory — because this blog plans to look at different aspects of memory (more on that later).
I had an MTA pass tacked on my bulletin board from my last trip to New York, and I thought back to the years I lived there (1988-1992), when New York was about the only city that didn’t offer a pass of some sort. You had to buy tokens, which cost between $1 and $1.25 during those years.
Because I took the bus constantly (no easy way to get from West 82nd Street to East 55th Street at 11 pm), I often bought tokens 10 or more at a time, and they jangled in my pocket if I was wearing shorts. They were known as Bullseye tokens, brass with a steel center.
I loved those things and can’t believe that I didn’t save one. I guess I didn’t think New York would start offering passes like everywhere else (or truly I didn’t think about it at all). But “Memory Token” came of it, and amazingly, the domain was available.
And here we are…
Technorati Tags:
memory, memory token, subway token
If I Had Alzheimer’s, What Would Be The Last Thing I’d Remember?
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?
Technorati Tags:
memory, memory token, Robyn Weisman, Alzheimer’s