TRANSIENCE

Transience is the weakening or loss of memory over time. Thanks to transience, we can forget embarrassing moments from high school, only to replace them with new embarrassing moments from adulthood. Daniel says with age our memories generally go from “reproductive and specific recollections to reconstructive and more general descriptions.

In people’s forties, story recall begins to decline. Word recall gets trickier in our fifties. It’s usually not huge – generally a 10-15% decline versus younger cohorts. Roughly 20% of people in their seventies still have memories as sharp as college students.