Is Your Mind Getting in the Way of Your Memory? |
People worry about losing their memory as they get older, but how much does this affect their actual memory?
A new study shows the value of maintaining a positive mindset about aging to keep your mental acuity sharp.
Refuse to be defined by negative views of aging, and you can defend yourself against those very beliefs.
It’s natural to be concerned about losing your memory as you get older, particularly since all you hear in the media is that it’s an inevitable process. What’s worse, you can hardly go online or watch TV without running into an ad telling you that not only will your memory deteriorate with age, but also that if you buy whatever product an advertiser is pitching, you can avoid this dire fate.
Belief in Memory Failure Can Cause Memory Failure
Despite the anti-hoopla in the scientific community about what a waste of money these products are, people still buy them. Now, the newest entry into the aging-memory debate shows even more emphatically why maybe the hype about memory loss is causing not just a little more harm than good, but a lot.
A new study by University of Queensland’s Sarah Coundouris and Julie Henry tests the effect of what’s called “self-directed ageism” on a certain form of memory—namely, the ability to remember what you’re supposed to do, or “prospective” memory. The term is somewhat self-explanatory, but for clarity, the authors define it as “the many ways in which ageist beliefs become increasingly self-relevant and internalized.”
Prior research has already demonstrated that internalized ageist beliefs, known as “stereotype threat,” can influence memory for past events. Prospective memory includes an additional twist beyond recall of the past. To remember what you need to do, you have to initiate the process by reminding yourself to get started on it, or by seeing some sort of cue and then realizing that........