Washington Post article
February 10, 2024
Have you ever mixed up the names of your children? Struggled to remember key dates or the year a loved one died? Recent news of mental lapses by President Biden and Donald Trump have sparked a national conversation and social media posts about what memory mistakes really mean about aging and brain health.
Matt Griffin, 54, who works in communications for a school district in Vancouver, Wash., said he thinks about his father, Grady Griffin, every day, and he remembers what he was doing the night his father died. But he can’t remember the exact date of his death from terminal brain and lung cancer. (He looked it up, and it was 19 years ago this month.) “I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect everybody to recall everything,” he said. “The thing I know that is ever present is my dad is gone, and I miss him.”
Experts agree. Memory, no matter what your age, is fallible and malleable. Our brain processes incalculable amounts of information at a given time, and there’s simply not room for all of it to be stored. And surprisingly, the act of forgetting is an important aspect of memory.
“Most of us have memory slips all the time. We can’t remember where we put our car keys. We can’t remember dates or names. But we don’t really notice the mistakes when we’re young. It’s when people get older that mistakes in memory seem to have more significance. Memory lapse really is normal at every stage of life.”
Earl K. Miller, Professor of Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
How our Memories Work
Our brain can process and hold vast amounts of information, but it has limits. Facts, dates and events can be stored and recalled for days and weeks — or even across a lifetime. As new memories are created, the brain must prioritize important memories, making it more difficult to recall less important details or events.
When we encounter new information, our brains encode it with changes in neurons in the hippocampus, an important memory center, as well as other areas. These groups of cells work together to hold onto the specific information of a memory, creating a memory trace, known as an engram.
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