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Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything?By: Jenny Knight and Tony Dawe Time really does seem to fly for older people. The active elderly are forever complaining that they don't know where the time has gone. Time seems to pass so quickly they often believe that events occurred longer ago than they actually did. Even for those poor unfortunates who are "sans everything", time can pass in a blur, leading to questions such as "Have I had my tea yet?" In these days of a reasonable average standard of living, good health care and modern technological support, the percentage of people who fit Shakespeare's idea of the last age of man is becoming ever smaller. It is no longer accurate, if it ever was, to categorise older people into a few stereotype images: grey-haired grannies, cloth-capped pigeon fanciers, or red-faced retired colonels. Those enjoying, or enduring, the seventh age are by far the most diverse of any age group. While some will undoubtedly experience serious medical problems, others remain as fit as people 30 years younger. It is wrong to generalise since some may decline intellectually while remaining vigorous while others will experience exactly the opposite. It is the mentally spry, yet physically afflicted, elderly person who must make the most effort to fill up each second, as fading eyesight may make reading difficult and increasing deafness makes conversation a chore. For this group, modern technology has been a boon, contributing to the development of devices to help them know when the doorbell or telephone is ringing and others which make the phone and other household items easier to use. For many of those whose eyesight remains in good working order, the Internet can allow access to a world they may no longer be able to visit physically. Graham Mulley, professor of medicine for the elderly at St James' University Hospital, Leeds, says: "There is a tendency to lump old people together and make generalised statements. People become more like themselves as they get older, with aspects of their personality becoming more pronounced. "As a generalisation, the elderly memory does have problems embedding and retrieving recent events. Someone may not be able to remember what they had for dinner yesterday but can remember in detail what they wore for their wedding decades before." At a sprightly 52, the professor has begun to feel that time is speeding up. He is not sure whether this is a changing perception or merely a reflection of how much time has passed and how much is left. He says: "It's an insidious thing, that events move more rapidly as time goes by. If you are five years old, a year is one fifth of your life. While if you are a hundred, it is only one hundredth." A day in the life of a five-year-old is full of new events: a bus ride, the first day at school, a new friend, the first football match. For the elderly, pleasurable new experiences are in short supply. Last night's trip to the shops, followed by dinner, tends to merge in the memory into an unaltering pattern of days whizzing by. An experiment by Susan Crawley, a psychologist at Goldsmiths' College, southeast London, throws some light on the "time flying" impression. She investigated the perception of time changing with age, by asking people in three age groups to date past public events. She discovered that the over-60s tend to date events too distantly, while mid-life people date events slightly too recently. "The results indicate that older people believe more time has passed than is indeed the case," she says. "This may help to explain why the years appear to fly past as we get older." Mario Kyriazis, an anti-ageing specialist and medical adviser to the British Longevity Society, says: "Some people say time flies as you get older but other people say 'I sit here doing nothing and time doesn't seem to pass at all'." These conflicting views have also been supported by experiments. In one test, when 20-year-olds were asked to sit still for three minutes - without being told the length of time - and then asked to estimate it, most were fairly accurate. Yet the elderly often added an extra 45 seconds to their estimates. So, far from feeling time is flying by, the elderly should be complaining that time hangs heavy. Because for every three minutes a young person experiences, the elderly have to get through a further 45 seconds. Dr Kyriazis believes that active elderly people with a structured life know how to evaluate time and are more accurate about how fast it is going. Those with no milestones to measure time by are different. He says people should try to structure their days: to go to yoga on Tuesday, for example, and an evening class on Thursday, so that time will seem to pass more normally. Few elderly people bother much about their faulty perceptions of time, although most are worried about failing memories, even though doctors say a slight deterioration does not inevitably lead to anything worse. Dr Kyriazis believes that we can all train ourselves from an early age to combat this worrying trait of the seventh age. "People should try to avoid excessive memory loss by keeping the brain active in early life and then later on," he says. "Do puzzles and crosswords and train your powers of observation. Mental training can slow down ageing of the brain." |
