The Twilight of Memory

Its gradual loss distorts conversations of the elderly

The elderly are often considered cantankerous, demanding, self-centered and just plain hard to get along with. Much of that is simple prejudice on the part of the young, and some of what passes for senility has been traced to physical disease. Now a British researcher reports that many unlovable traits of the elderly come from the gradual loss of memory, and the embarrassment it brings.

The researcher, Patrick Rabbitt, 46, is an Oxford University psychologist who specializes in the problems of aging, including memory loss. Over the years, Rabbitt has found that people 70 and older prefer talking to one person at a time: the one-on-one situation focuses attention and shores up poor memory. In a group conversation, the elderly are likely to be tense and more easily confused. While they seem able to remember what was said, they forget who said it, or to whom it was said. In a series of tests with men and women 70 and over, Rabbitt and his colleagues found that a roomful of speakers was too much to juggle for many of the oldsters: those who remembered what was said could not recollect who said it; those who recalled who spoke could not remember what was said.

Another problem, the researchers found, is that the elderly cannot easily switch from one voice to another. Given sequences of sentences recorded by different people and played back on stereo tapes as if the voices were coming from different locations, the old people were usually confused. Rabbitt asked them to repeat aloud everything said on the tapes, and though the subjects did well as long as they could home in on a single voice, whenever there was a change in voice or location, they had trouble.

Finally, the hearing of the elderly often may be adequate for their age, but straining to hear well can drain their energies. Some years ago, Rabbitt did studies for the British Post Office showing that sounds heard through low levels of noise are difficult to recapture. "If you are listening through crackle," he says, "even if you can repeat what is said, you can't remember it as well." By the same token, elderly people with a minor hearing problem may have to concentrate so much to pick up a voice that they forget the contents of the sentence.

These three facts, says the researcher, could explain why old people are often accused of trying to do all the talking. "This is attributed to natural selfishness and some corrosion of personality," says Rabbitt. "In fact, it could just be a defense against the possibility of embarrassing muddle. Just because you've got a poor memory doesn't mean you are not aware of the embarrassment you cause. And one way of not being embarrassed, and of being sure you know what's going on, is to be the only person who has spoken."

Old people in groups sometimes sound like a caricature of a bad cocktail party--each person bursts forth to speak his own mind, apparently without listening to anyone else. Rabbitt calls these outbursts "disjunctive interruptions" and suggests they have nothing to do with egotism or intolerance. "In fact, the old people have little choice," he says. "They can follow each statement, but they get muddled as to the theme, because they lose track of who said what." Once caught in that bind, an oldster has limited options: he or she can always launch a new monologue or simply sit there and let the other monologues go by.

The Bombay-born son of a civil servant, Rabbitt became interested in aging by accident, when conducting routine tests in connection with his Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge, which showed widely varying reactions between young and old. He once tested some 2,000 people in St. Petersburg, Fla., for the U.S. Public Health Service, and his current project is a thorough study of 500 old people in the Oxford area. Though his picture of failing memory is stark, Rabbitt points out that the description hardly fits everyone: 5% to 10% of people in their 70s have memories just as reliable as their grandchildren's.

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