Alan Castel
Professor of psychology at UCLA, where he studies human memory, attention and cognitive ageing, and author of Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging.
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Korrents What they believe 24 beliefs — each backed by an exact quote.
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Seeing something many times does not put it into memory: familiarity with a thing and knowledge of it are different, and people confuse the two constantly.
And I think that illustrates also how our memory works. That just seeing something many times doesn't mean you'll remember it well. And this is a classic demonstration that, you know, you've seen a penny many times. You don't remember all the features on the penny.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Learning should be made harder rather than easier, and a teacher's instinct to smooth the path is the first thing that goes wrong.
How can you make learning kind of uncomfortable, but that you'll remember things better? And it goes against a lot of our intuitions. A lot of teachers will want to say, how can we make learning easier? And I think that's probably the first problem is you don't want it to be easy.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
There is no such thing as photographic memory: people with exceptional visual memory still make ordinary memory errors.
the research on photographic memory does show that even people who have very strong visual memory will make memory errors. So it's not that you know it's exactly photographic but their visual memory is exceptional.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
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Photographing a moment can weaken your memory of it, because the reason you took the picture was not to have to remember.
Now, it can also make your memory worse because you're realizing I want to I'm taking this photo so I don't need to remember it later. And so, you could see it going both ways, but that selection process is important.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Remembering the past and imagining the future are one brain process, which is why what you can imagine is bounded by what you have already lived.
And our brain does a lot of interesting things in terms of, you know, reconstructing the past also has a similar brain signature as imagining the future. which you know in some ways makes sense. We shouldn't have separate parts of the brain for thinking about the past and thinking about the future.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Picking someone out of a lineup overwrites the memory of the face actually seen, so identification makes a witness more confident and less accurate at the same time.
And as a result of identifying that person in a lineup, that person then replaces what they actually saw. So our memory can be contaminated just like any form of evidence could be contaminated.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Confidence in a memory is not evidence of its accuracy, and our sense of how our own memory works is systematically wrong.
And sometimes confidence, high confidence doesn't necessarily mean high accuracy. And I think part of the reason we're fooled is usually, you know, the more you see something, the better you'll remember it, just like the Apple logo. But that's not always the case.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Forgetting is a feature of a working memory system rather than a failure of it.
It's as simple as you you need to know your hotel room number when you're staying there. But if I ask you your hotel room number a week later, it's gone. But that's good in a way because you're going to have other numbers to remember and other hotel room numbers to remember. So there's benefits of forgetting.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Loving, competent parents leave infants in hot cars because routine takes over from intention; the mechanism is habit, not negligence.
When you look at these investigations, the reason this happens is, you know, these are very responsible, very intelligent parents who will, you know, put their child in the car and then get in the car and then you just get in this mode of I'm going to work. I'm going to do my job and you're in this routine.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Alzheimer's pathology in the brain does not settle whether a person has dementia: the nuns' brains were full of plaques and tangles while they went on functioning normally.
and you found that these nuns, how they aged, some of them certainly when they passed away, their brains had these kind of hallmark signs of dementia, plaques and tangles, but behaviorally they were still high functioning. So, it's really interesting that the hardware shows what we see as dementia and specifically Alzheimer's disease, but their behavior uh was that of a fairly healthy cognitive person.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Walking three or four times a week grew older adults' hippocampus by one percent and left their memory better a year later, which no pill has managed.
But in the walking group the group that was randomly assigned to walk three four times a week for 40 minutes compared to a stretching group who's still engaging in exercise but not cardiovascular exercise. The walking group their you know hippocamp is actually increased in volume by 1%. So you're changing the the brain, but you're also changing the behavior. Their memory was much better a year later.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Balance, not memory, is what middle-aged and older people should be worrying about, and almost nobody knows what state theirs is in.
And I think, you know, most people when they talk about aging, they're so worried about dementia and, you know, Alzheimer's disease as a specific form, but balance is even more important, I think. And most people aren't even aware of their balance.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Balance is highly trainable, and something as small as standing on one leg improves it measurably within a month or two.
What's interesting with balance is it's very trainable. And so, you know, there's parts of balance that involve visual inner ear, but if you engage in some training, and it can be as simple as standing on one leg or doing yoga or taichi, you can improve your balance considerably within a month or two.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
How old you feel predicts how long you will live better than how old you actually are.
it's also interesting that that subjective age is a better predictor of how long you'll live than your biological age.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
After forty, people systematically feel about twenty percent younger than they are.
And actually, after the age of 40, most people feel about 20% younger than their actual age.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Happiness across a life is a curve rather than a decline, and its lowest point is midlife, not old age.
there's some interesting work on you know happiness being more curve linear like midlife is actually some of the lowest levels of happiness and life satisfaction
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Older adults came through the pandemic more psychologically resilient than younger adults, which is the opposite of what was expected of them.
But what we found, at least at the psychological level, we did some of this research, older adults were much more resilient than younger adults.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Believing that ageing goes well is itself protective: people with a positive attitude to ageing live longer and are less likely to develop dementia.
And actually, more recent research shows that those who have a positive attitude live longer, they're less likely to develop dementia.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Superagers are not extremists, and that is the point: what keeps them sharp is ordinary enough for anyone to copy.
these super aes are not extremists. They're not like running marathons and eating, you know, only blueberries.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Five hours a week with grandchildren goes with better memory in older adults, and more than twenty hours a week does not.
I think some research, again it's correlational, shows that people who spend, you know, 5 hours a week with their grandchildren have improved memory. So that seems we don't know if it's causal, but it's interesting that those who spend more than 20 hours a week don't show this benefit. In fact, might show the opposite.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Curiosity does not simply fade with age: the general disposition declines while curiosity aroused by a particular thing you care about actually increases.
but as you get older that tends to decline with age which I thought was kind of perplexing because I you know a lot of curious people but we found that levels of state curiosity when I give you some interesting bit of information but I don't give you the answer if it's something you care about that actually increases with age your level of curiosity and learning.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
Older adults are not worse rememberers so much as more selective ones: they keep what they were curious about and let the rest go.
And so, in this study on curiosity, we found that older adults tend to remember the things that they're most curious about, but they're also really good at forgetting the things that they just didn't care about in the first place.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
What look like the priorities of old age are the priorities of a short time horizon: tell a young person they have five years and they choose the same way.
But her work has shown that when you give people different time perspectives, they make different choices. So if you unfortunately tell someone who's younger that they only have 5 to 10 years left to live, they're going to make choices very much like older adults too.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
You learn where something is by going to find it rather than by being told, and that act is the whole difference between seeing something and noticing it.
And so we've done this study where you have to, instead of me telling you where it is, you have to get up and find it. And so now you're engaging with the environment, you're going to go look for it and be like, gosh, it's been there the whole time. have walked by it so many times have never noticed it. And I think that's the difference between seeing something and noticing it.
How to Improve Your Memory & Cognitive Function at Any Age | Dr. Alan Castel Said 13 Jul 2026
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