AGE AND COGNITIVE CAPACITY —

DO WE NECESSARILY GET MORE STUPID AS WE AGE?

NO!

Age is just a number. Although it often corresponds to deteriorating mental and physical circumstances, the age number is NOT the cause.

Physically, wear and tear are the principal causes of increasing difficulty. Consider professional athletes. Basketball players in their forties and fifties whose knees are so bad they can’t go up and down stairs.

Eighty year old people may suffer the same condition for the same cause — wear and tear, but the medical profession has programed society to blame it on age. Not so.

Mental deterioration can have many causes, but the age number is not one of them. The primary causes are the choice of mental and physical laziness, and injuries or illness that can happen at any age.

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This subject has become a prominent political issue. Our society, fed by the medical profession, has accepted the presumption that cognitive deterioration is a necessary and predictable function of age.

Simple observation of those who refuse to accept the proposition reveals otherwise. Those who accept the proposal that age is the cause of deteriorating mental abilities fulfill it, deteriorating on schedule.

Perhaps it is just my rationalization searching for a plausible excuse for slower memory of names, etc. at age 87, but my excuse is that my mental hard drive is so overloaded with information that…