Page 51 - The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss and Enhance Memory Power

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Looking forward to change and having a willingness to adapt.
Maintaining strong relationships and social bonds.
Maintaining high self-esteem.
Bouncing back from adversity.

Young Learning, Old Learning

Aging has a gradual, steadily progressive impact on memory processes. Compared to young people,
older people are less skilled in associating unrelated items presented to them. This decline is greatest
when older subjects have to associate different stimuli to produce a complex memory, and is
probably due to loss of nerve cells in the association areas (brain regions responsible for associating
different events and stimuli) in the parahippocampus and the frontal lobes. However, in these same
experiments, older people were much better than their young counterparts at tasks requiring
planning, organization, and the manipulation of information. In other words, even though young
adults are much better at learning new information than middle-aged and older people, they fall short
when it comes to tasks that require careful planning and judgment. You should recognize this
organizational capacity as an important strength in yourself when you evaluate your intellectual
capabilities.

Aging Changes Your Mental Abilities
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Reaction time to an event slows
Dealing with multiple stimuli and tasks becomes difficult
Thinking slows
Learning new information becomes difficult
Remembering names becomes more difficult
Short-term memory slowly deteriorates
Intelligence and long-term memory are preserved, including memory for music and other artistic
memories
Common sense, planning, organizational skills, and judgment improve. You develop wisdom.

Creativity and Associative Thinking

The flip side of cognitive decline is cognitive improvement, and further along the spectrum lies the
phenomenon of creativity. Some creative abilities are innate or genetic, like musical skills, but
learning

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