We all have moments of forgetfulnessCraig Boylan
We’ve all been there. You walk upstairs only to find yourself wondering why you bothered. You blank on an acquaintance’s name, just as you’re introducing them. Or maybe, after a frantic search, you find your car keys in the fridge of all places.
Such momentary lapses of memory can be disconcerting, but they are part and parcel of getting older, and very much to be expected. “Decline in what researchers call episodic memory – what happened, where and when – is a normal part of human cognitive ageing,” says Ulman Lindenberger, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. “In most adults, decline becomes apparent in their 60s… and it affects all stages of memory, from the encoding of new events over consolidation to retention and recall.”
This is largely explained by structural and functional changes to the brain that begin in middle age and accelerate from there. In a 2025 paper analysing more than 3700 “cognitively healthy” adults, Lindenberger and his colleagues found age-related memory decline tracks closely with the deterioration of connections between brain regions, itself the result of the gradual degradation of the fatty coating that insulates neurons, and shrinkage of the hippocampus – a brain region crucial in forming new memories.
