Addendum to yesterday's post. An old friend read yesterday's blog and reminded me that age is a factor in word retrieval. I wondered how much aging was involved in the inability to retrieve words. So I googled it. How did we ever get along without google! Anyway, here is what I found:
It is normal for word-finding problems to increase as we age
It is normal for us to be slower in processing information as we age
Difficulty in retrieving words does not mean the words are lost; there is no evidence that we lose vocabulary in normal aging
There is little evidence for any change in semantic structure (the organization of words in memory) with age
Older adults probably have more trouble dealing with large amounts of information
Older adults may develop different strategies as they age, probably to accommodate their decline in processing speed and processing capacity
Google is a third lobe of our brains. It is getting harder to remember a time when I would have had to go to a library to look in a book to discover this information. Who knows, there may come a day when we all will long to do just that, because as someone once said, "True knowledge is knowing that you know nothing."
No comments:
Post a Comment