Page 7 - Seniorstoday November 2023 Issue
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equally elderly husband, Shyam, Mohini Many of these limitations are reversible
ponders what they can do with the time and related to poor sleep, but structural
remaining. changes that take place in your brain
The nostalgia associated with old age, if as you age can explain some of these
it occurs, appears incurable, since there developments. Just as you may not run
can be no possibility of a return to an as fast or jump as high as you did as a
irrecoverable youth. To describe ageing teenager, your brain’s cognitive power—
and the emotions that come with it as grief that is, your ability to learn, remember, and
would be a strong word. For, it’s not the solve problems—slows down with age. You
sharp grief that follows a bereavement may find it harder to summon once familiar
(though bereavements do accumulate with facts or divide your attention among two or
the years), but a more elusive emotion. more activities or sources of information.
One that is, perhaps, closest to the bone- These changes affect your ability to focus,
gnawing sorrow of homesickness. But as so you may find yourself getting more
with nostalgia, how badly those afflicted easily distracted than you were when you
suffer seems to depend on how they were younger.
manage their relationship with the past. The result is that as you age, it takes
Most people start to notice changes as they longer to absorb, process, and remember
enter their 50s and 60s. Although these new information. Therefore, you not only
changes can cause consternation, most learn information more slowly, but you
age-related memory and thinking problems also may have more trouble recalling it
don’t stem from an underlying brain because you didn’t fully learn it in the first
disease such as Alzheimer’s Disease. place.
Hearing loss that often accompanies
ageing makes it more difficult to
distinguish speech in a noisy environment.
Because hearing then requires more
concentration than usual, even mild loss
of the ability to focus can affect speech
comprehension. At this time, I make an
expression of agreeing with a person
and ask another question to take the
conversation elsewhere.
Instead, what appears to be a memory Even the aches and pains of getting older
problem may simply reflect a slower can affect focus. Pain itself is distracting,
processing speed and poor encoding and and some of the medications used to treat it
retrieval of new memories as a result of also can affect concentration.
diminished attention. However, even Between 50 and 60 is also the age when
though your brain may be slower to learn we have our mid-life crises. We join gyms,
and recall new information, your ability and take up running; we speak for the first
to make sense of what you know and to time of ‘bucket lists’ – the term itself being
form reasonable arguments and judgments an attempt to diminish the sting of time’s
remains intact. depredations. None of these will save us
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