The old have a good memory too

The NY Times has an article by a neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin "Everyone Knows Memory Fails as You Age. But Everyone Is Wrong" that claims that the idea that when you get old you forget more is wrong. Yes, there are illnesses like Alzheimer that seriously affect memory. But often we fool ourselves by attributing forgetfulness of the young to irresponsibility, lack of sleep or stress and blaming the same happening to the old on dementia. If you leave people with Alzheimer illnesses aside memory sees only a very minor reduction. And the minor loss in speed can at least partially be explained by the fact that the memory is fuller. Some aspects of memory actually get better as we age. For instance, our ability to extract patterns, regularities and to make accurate predictions improves over time because we’ve had more experience. (This is why computers need to be shown tens of thousands of pictures of traffic lights or cats in order to be able to recognize them). If you’re going to get an X-ray, you want a 70-year-old radiologist reading it, not a 30-year-old one.