Eli5 why do people get dumber /forgetful when they get older?
In: Other
I am by no means an expert so feel free to correct my mistakes however, certain parts of the brain such as the hippocampus starts shrinking after a certain age resulting in the individual to have worse memory. The hippocampus starts shrinking at a certain speed that can be halted by training regularly and keeping fit by doing things such as jogging. It can also be hurried by lack of sleep and other unhealthy habits.
To sum it up our brain shrinks resulting in a decrease in our abilities to store old memories and to remember new memories as the main storage deteriorates
Over the course of a life, you accumulate little bits of cellular damage that the body can’t perfectly repair. In some cases, damage occurs in the brain, for a variety of reasons, and this damage causes brain cells to lose some of their dendrites (the bits that connect them to other brain cells). In some cases they can even be killed permanently. This means fewer functional connections in the brain, and since everything the brain does is the result of how cells connect to each other, reduced overall brain function.
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