Recent work by a team of psychologists and linguists led by Michael Ramscar at the University of Tübingen has suggested that what we call “cognitive decline”—lags and retrieval errors—may not be about the search process slowing or deteriorating, but (at least partly) an unavoidable consequence of the amount of information we have to navigate getting bigger and bigger. Regardless of whatever other challenges aging brings, older brains—which must manage a greater store of memories—are literally solving harder computational problems with every passing day.
