Our ability to ignore distractions declines from a high of 82 percent when younger (average age twenty-six) to a low of 56 percent when older (average age sixty-seven). That’s what happened in the pantry. Rather than ignoring the pizza-littered war zone to get the juice, I became distracted by it. Interestingly, it’s not the inability to focus that produces the problem. Older folks concentrate on tasks just as well as younger ones, maybe even better. It’s the increasing inability to ignore distractions.
