In a recent article on The Conversation magazine, Prof. Alexander Easton of Durham University explains why we can’t remember things as we get older. He writes “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.”

One of the explanation Prof. Easton refers is, things like “remembering things becomes difficult because something changes in the brain that makes it more difficult to store information”. He quotes this recent a paper in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences for alternative explanation. According to the paper:

• Healthy aging is accompanied by declines in control of attention.
• These reductions in the control of attention, result in older adults processing too much information, creating cluttered memory representations.
• Cluttered representations can impair memory by interfering with the retrieval of target information, but can also provide an advantage on tasks that benefit from extensive knowledge.

Prof. Easton summarizes the findings as follows:

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