Healthy aging, 7 minutes

What Changes About Memory After Sixty

Nothing here moves in one direction. Some of it slows, some of it holds, and a little of it is still improving at seventy-five.

Memory Is Not One Thing

In ordinary speech “memory” covers several unrelated systems that age at completely different rates. Treating them as one is the main reason people conclude something is wrong when nothing is.

The things that get slower

How fast you arrive at an answer. First to change and easiest to measure. The answer is still correct; it simply takes an extra moment to surface.
Pulling up a specific word or name. The stored copy is fine. The path to it has more traffic on it than it used to.
Running two demanding things at once. Routinely blamed on memory when the actual constraint is attention, which is a separate system.
How much you can juggle at a time. A postcode held in mind while you hunt for something to write it on.

The things that do not

Vocabulary is generally still expanding at seventy-five.
What you know and what you are good at. Forty years of accumulated material stays where you left it.
Anything your hands learned. Driving, baking, the piano. Extremely durable.
Reading a situation, and keeping your temper in it. Frequently sharper than it was at thirty.
Knowing you have met someone. Considerably more robust than producing their name unaided, which is the asymmetry behind most of this.

Almost everything that frightens people in their sixties is a fetching problem rather than a keeping problem. Nothing has been thrown out. It just takes longer to find.

Where the Line Sits

The distinction that matters is not how often but what kind.

Usually ordinary	Worth an appointment
A name arrives twenty minutes late	Your own family’s names, going missing again and again
Keys lost, then found by retracing your steps	Keys turning up somewhere nobody can explain
Having to think about what today’s date is	Not being sure of the year, or which room you walked into
Telling the same story twice in a month	Asking the same question twice before lunch
Half a conversation gone	No recollection that the conversation took place
Defeated by a new phone	Defeated by the drive to your own doctor
Reaching for a word	Wrong words arriving until the sentence means nothing

The right-hand column is a list of reasons to make an appointment, not a diagnosis. Its items have many possible causes, and a good number of them are treatable.

Where the Returns Actually Are

If you put the evidence in order of how much it is likely to buy you, the top of the list is dull and nothing on it is sold in a bottle.

Start with your ears. Untreated hearing difficulty carries one of the heaviest associations with later cognitive decline of anything a person can do something about, and it is the one most often left alone for a decade. Then your blood pressure — the readings that appear to matter for the brain are the ones taken in your forties and fifties, which is exactly when nobody is checking. Then movement, where the clearest data sits with anything that raises your pulse and keeps it there.

After those three: sleep, and a proper investigation if somebody in the house has complained about your snoring. Company, which is more demanding work for the brain than any puzzle book, because another person is unpredictable and a crossword is not. And eating with some shape to it, where the Mediterranean pattern has collected the most supportive research.

A daily capsule belongs after all six, and not in place of any of them. We sell one, and putting it at the bottom of this page is a statement of where it sits rather than false modesty.

Where a daily capsule belongs

Seventh on the list, behind your ears, your blood pressure, your legs, your sleep, your company and your plate.

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Quick Answers

Expect answers to take a beat longer to surface, names and particular words to stick on the way out, less tolerance for two demanding jobs at the same moment, and a slightly smaller amount you can hold in mind at once. Meanwhile your vocabulary, your accumulated knowledge, your practised skills and your knack for spotting a familiar face are all steady or still growing.

What matters is a change in kind rather than in how often. The same question asked twice inside an hour, uncertainty about the season or where you are, a drive you have done for years going wrong, or the wrong words arriving until a sentence no longer means anything — any of those earns an appointment.