"The older mind may just be a fuller mind"

 

It’s heartening for somebody struggling as I am increasingly to remember the names of people, and assuming, like my contemporaries, that this is a sign of an aging mind, to read an article in the Observer today, quoting from another in the New York Times.


It appears that researchers in Germany are wondering whether indeed older minds may just be fuller minds, rather than atrophying minds.  The article states, cheerily, that “since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word.  And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, most aging “deficits” disappeared.”


The article finishes on this happy note for me:  “It’s not that you’re slow.  It’s that you know so much.”