Age and Memory

Older adults often have trouble remembering recent unimportant facts like what they had to eat the day before. At the same time, they often have exceptional memory about events when they were younger: “I was in third grade sitting next to so-and-so and wearing such-and-such and was eating…”

I’ve been thinking that maybe the reason for this discrepancy is that as we age, our memory recall stays very good but our memory forming and consilidation in the hippocampus and elsewhere gets impaired. In that case they are still recalling memories well but they simply don’t effectively store in their brain what they, for example, ate the day before.