One
of those things that I heard somewhere that has stuck with me is,
"Wisdom is the ability to tell the difference between what is important
and what is not." That seems to be the basis of research that shows that
older people, even with declining memories, make better decisions
overall than younger people.
As we age, we become
more selective about what we remember, says Dr. Alan Castel of UCLA, one
of the study’s lead researchers. In an earlier study, his team tested
older and younger adults’ ability to recall a list of words. The initial
findings, as one would expect, showed that younger subjects remembered
more of the words. However, when the two groups were provided the same
list, but with some words assigned a higher number value than others,
older participants were better than younger subjects at remembering the
words assigned high scores and ignoring those with low scores.
It
appears that as we age, we may become better able to differentiate
between important and less important information. “While memory tends to
decline as we get older, it seems that older adults selectively
remember more important information,” Castel says.
Makes
plenty of sense to me. As I've gotten older, my head is still filled
with useless trivia, but I no longer make an effort to memorize phone
numbers or song lyrics. Of course, you know the corollary to the earlier
adage: "Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from
bad judgement."
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