"What's the name of our neighbor? I can't remember right now. " Have you ever heard your grandparents ask questions like this sometimes? Usually, we think that older people's memory becomes bad because their brains get weak. But now a team of scientists at the University of Tubingen in Germany has a new idea.[ "The human brain works slower in old age," says Michael Ramscar, the lead scientist. "But only because they have stored more information overtime. " The findings are based on a series of computer simulations of learning and memory. Scientists let the computers read a certain amount of words and learn new things each day. When the computer "reads" only so much, its performance on cognitive tests is similar of a young adult. But if the computer learns the experiences we might encounter over a lifetime, its performance is similar to that of an older adult. Often it is slower, but not because its processing capacity has declined. Rather, increased "experience" has caused the computer's database to grow, giving it more data to process-which takes time. This is similar to old people. Imagine a person knows two people's birthdays. Another person knows the birthdays of 2000 people, but can only match the right person to the right birthday nine times out of 10. Can you say the first person has a better memory than the second person? According to the research, why do old people forget people's names easily?
Because they have a very poor memory. Because they are too old to remember things. Because their brains become weaker than before. Because they have stored too much information.