'Everything Goes So Fast These Days':

how our mental capacities change

After turning 50, almost all of us worry from time to time that our memories are beginning to fail. Perhaps you can't recall someone's name, or where you left the house keys. And that's just the beginning — before you know it, you're forgetting to turn off the gas ... Or you might find it difficult to keep up with technological progress; today's fast-paced information society is leaving you behind. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry: none of these concepts existed 15 years ago. Now they are common currency.

Everyone wants to live for a long time, but no one wants to be old. If you ask 40-year-olds if they would rather be 65, almost none of them will say yes, even though they see the advantages of more leisure time after retirement. Besides poorer health, the greatest fear is of memory loss and a declining ability to concentrate. Or people worry that they won't be able to keep up as their thought processes become slower and less nimble. As long ago as the 4th century BCE, the Greek philosopher Plato maintained that the loss of physical strength caused by ageing was accompanied by a reduction in intellectual capacity. At an advanced age, he argued, you are no more capable of learning new things than of running as fast as you once did. Was Plato right? Which mental capacities do in fact deteriorate with age? When does the process start? How fast does it progress? And what capacities remain unaffected?

preconceptions

Many people, including older people, have an inaccurate and far too bleak a picture of life after 65, or the 'third age' as it is known. In 2008, the theme of the Dutch Boekenweek (Literature Week) was 'On the Elderly: the third age and literature'. To mark the occasion, the newspaper deVolkskrant and the VU University Amsterdam conducted a survey on perceptions of older people in the Netherlands. Participants had to say whether a statement was correct or incorrect. One example was 'Fifty per cent of older people are lonely'. Of the 751 participants, 47 per cent thought this statement was correct, but in fact they were wrong. Only a small percentage of older people are lonely, as shown in the long-term, large-scale Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam, which supplied the information for the survey. The participants got many of the other answers wrong too, their view being consistently gloomier than reality. For instance, they often made the wrong choice in the statements regarding declining networks of family, friends, and acquaintances (13 per cent got this right). Most of the participants thought these networks shrink drastically as a person ages. In reality, there are many differ