As we grow older, our early life comes sharply into focus (Image: Philippe Lopparelli/Tendance Floue)

The thought of losing our memory is a terrifying part of ageing, but there are surprising upsides, says Douwe Draaisma in The Nostalgia Factory

NEXT month I turn 50. If you think of memory as a transatlantic flight, then this is when it starts to make its descent. The first signs that it is losing altitude are failures in “prospective memory” – forgetting to do things, or worse, forgetting whether you have remembered to do them. Words and names will also become increasingly elusive. Time to panic?

“You can scare a fifty-year-old rigid by saying, aghast: ‘You surely can’t have forgotten that!'” writes Douwe Draaisma in his latest book, The Nostalgia Factory. Clearly, the Heymans Professor of the History of Psychology at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands is a bit of a tease. But in fact, one of his aims is to reassure anyone with a memory past its prime that there is little to worry about.


For me, his most convincing argument comes from experiments revealing that older memories compare far more favourably with younger ones than their owners realise. Like the plane’s descent, the decline will start unfeasibly early, but it is very gradual. What’s more, this is perfectly natural. “Anyone who still has the memory of a twenty-year-old at the age of seventy is not entirely normal,” he writes.

Accept the inevitable, and you are halfway there. Stressing over an errant word or name will only make it harder to retrieve. Besides, unrealistic expectations leave us prey to the commercialisation of ageing. Draaisma derides the “forgetfulness market” and debunks the idea that memory is like a muscle whose performance can be improved with brain-training games. You don’t need off-the-shelf stimulus, he advises, just to get out a bit more. “The good news is that social activities are sufficient. They involve all the variety and challenges needed to keep the memory up to scratch.”

“Draaisma derides the ‘forgetfulness market’ and debunks the idea that memory is like a muscle”

For the rest, a few simple strategies will work wonders: pay attention to what you are doing, have a place for objects and keep them there, and write things down. Draaisma reminds us of the saying attributed to Confucius: “The palest ink is more reliable than the most powerful memory.”

There are even benefits to an older memory. A puzzling quirk of memory is that as we get older our early life comes sharply into focus. This so-called reminiscence effect is recorded in several experiments, revealing that most of the vivid and precious memories of older people date from their childhood and early adulthood, producing a peak centred on their mid-20s.

Why this happens is the subject of much debate, but Draaisma favours the idea that from our 60s onward, early memories start to be over-represented. And it gets more intriguing. “As the reminiscence effect attains its full force, memories will return to which you have long been denied access,” he writes. What revelations will my mind reveal? I can’t wait to find out.

This isn’t your average popular science book. It is more philosophical, more diffuse, more cultured than many. Particularly entertaining is the description of Swiss writer Max Frisch’s fictitious voluntary death society, whose members meet twice a year to draw attention to signs of old age in each other. Their criteria are a work of comic genius.

Other digressions are less successful, including a whole chapter-long interview with neurologist Oliver Sachs. But at other times Draaisma leaves too much unsaid. Exploring the idea that individual memories change as we age, for example, he raises the fascinating question of how and why they are transformed, then dismisses it in a mere page.

That said, The Nostalgia Factory is absorbing. So much so that, reading it in bed one night, I got diverted from my usual routine and forgot to set my alarm. A failure of prospective memory you might think, but not so fast. Drifting off, I did remember – and was in no doubt that I had forgotten. I’m not 50 yet.

The Nostalgia Factory: Memory, time and ageing Douwe Draaisma Yale University Press

This article appeared in print under the headline “Remember this”