Memory and Aging

I had a total of 10 hour participation refreshing my memory on aging and memory at York University, Neurology Psychology department at BSB. I studied most of this in my undergrad within one lecture. However we never actually participated in anything we studied. It was all theory. I cannot talk about what we shared due to confidentiality which is too bad so sad because all was interesting. So I will stick to the facts which mainly is composed from our handout book, “A Practical Guide to Managing your Memory Memory and Aging” by Dr Angela Troyer in collaboration with others and the profs. We were informed that 2% of persons 65-74 have dementia; 11% from the 75-84 group. “Only 8% of Canadians 65 and older have dementia” (p 12). In earlier blogs I have written about memory and aging and I suggest you look that up because it is in detail from my undergrad notes. But I will keep this simple for a basic understanding. It was simple in the way it was explained to us which is a pleasant change since it stuck to my brain. I still remember that 5 Nov is when we move our clocks back and 2/3 of the population have never seen snow. Do I need to know that? There are three processes to memory which is encoding - getting information into memory. The second is Storage - keeping the information in memory and the last - Retrieval which is getting the information back out of memory when it is needed (p6). Difficulties in any of these three areas will interfere with memory. If you are not paying attention or distracted you may not be able to encode. If you used to know something and don’t anymore such as a password this is where storage is. Retrieval problems occur when you want to use a word you know but cannot retrieve it right away. Storage is affected the least by aging; retrieval the most (p7). to be continued next week. Sorry for the delays but it is summer and I have to get out there. Do you feel your memory has decreased? What have you done about it? Next week I will continue by briefly listing the medical disorders and diseases in association with memory. What do you think?