Recent gaffes by Biden and Trump may be signs of normal aging
How Do We Get Better Knowledge? A View from Trump during his Presidency on Cognitive Assessments and Detection of Dementia
Tan says that you have more experience as you get older. He said that it’s important to look at candidate’s cognitive abilities, but also their wisdom and the principles they live by.
During his presidency, Trump claimed to have done the Montreal cognitive assessment or MoCA. The 10-minute screening test is not an in-depth look at cognitive function, according to Sha.
Sha says that it’s important to measure a person’s cognitive performance against their performance earlier in life. A retired professor may be able to do well on cognitive tests despite their mental decline.
But diagnosing those conditions requires more than an hour of testing and a thorough history of someone’s life, Tan says, not just watching a few seconds of a press conference.
Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia become more common with each passing decade. An estimated 40% of people between 80 and 85 have either dementia, which makes independent living difficult, or what’s known as mild cognitive impairment.
The temporary inability to remember names, in particular, “is very common as we get older,” says Dr. Sharon Sha, a clinical professor of neurology at Stanford University.
A healthy brain typically retains its ability to learn and store information. Older people have a harder time retrieving information because their brain’s ability to quickly retrieve it becomes less reliable.
A typical person in their 20s might be able to reliably hold seven digits in working memory, Sha says. As we age that might diminish, but not to zero.
What Does It Take to Make Sense Of A Career? Dr. Zaldy Tan’s Arguments Concerning the Effect of Brain Processing Speed on Executive-Level Decision Making
That may be a problem for a race car driver or an airline pilot, Tan says. But it’s less likely to make a difference to someone who is doing “an executive-level job, where there is a lot of support and a lot more time to do planning and decision making.”
One reason for the decline is a decrease in the speed at which the brain processes information. Slower processing means a person may take longer to respond to a question or make a decision.
“We’ve all had them,” says Dr. Zaldy Tan, who directs the Memory and Healthy Aging Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “It’s just that we are not public figures and therefore this is not as noticeable or blown up.”
During his presidential campaign, US President Donald Trump had said he had taken a cognitive test in Montreal,Quebec, to check for dementia and Alzheimer’s. However, a Stanford University neurology professor said that the 10-minute screening test is not in-depth look at cognitive function, adding that it’s important to measure a person’s cognitive performance against their performance earlier in life.