Is it true that people’s mental abilities inevitably decline as they get older?
A. For many years, researchers believed that mental functioning declined with age, slowly at first, then more rapidly in old age as more and more brain cells die. Growing evidence now suggests that cell death is not responsible for cognitive slowing over the lifespan. Also, any decline that does occur is uneven across different types of tasks and across different individuals. That is, while performance often declines considerably in tasks requiring fast information processing, and commitment of details to memory, the decline is small or virtually non-existent in other areas such as vocabulary or exercise of good judgment. In non-cognitive areas, such as emotional management, older people seem to be more skilled than younger people. Also some older people show little, if any, decline at all.
