Cognitive Decline Due to Ageing is a Myth!

For someone in my age category reading about how the pervasive myth that cognitive abilities decline with age isn't true is pretty exciting. The important thing to know here is that if you believe your cognitive ability can improve, you can learn more than if you believe your cognitive ability is fixed or limited. This makes sense to the retired teacher in me because I am constantly learning new things (some of which I blog about). True I have some memory lapses but research says this could be because I have a larger mental dictionary to look through for a specific name, face, fact, or memory. As we age (and as we learn new things) we get better at ignoring things we don’t need to know and experience matters. I've known that experience matters for a long time but I didn’t realize that it continues to be very significant as people continue to age. The other thing that matters is context. Retirement leads older people to spend most of their time in highly familiar environments and this can make it harder for them to absorb the context that separates one memory from another leading to confusion. This seems to be pointing to why changing things up, learning new things, and increasing new knowledge is still important, even for old retirees like me!