Footnote

a That older persons can keep their thinking ability active though well up in years was well illustrated in an article “Your Mind Improves With Age,” which was condensed from The American Weekly and printed in The Reader’s Digest, January, 1959. A group of 127 persons who as college freshmen had taken an intelligence test in 1919 were given the same test more than thirty years later. Not only were the scores of this test higher in general information quizzes and in practical judgment, but also in tests requiring logic and clear thinking. Another group of persons have regularly taken “concept mastery” tests since childhood. Their mental abilities have increased steadily from twenty to over fifty years of age with no sign whatsoever that advancing age was limiting such growth. Persons of average intelligence have kept getting higher scores right through their seventies and eighties. A University of Michigan study showed that the memory and the ability to learn do not decline with advancing age any more than general intelligence. There was no difference in the ability of the young, middle-aged or old to recall specific incidents. And in a nonsense-paragraph experiment the older people, though taking longer in preparation, were more accurate in remembering the words. In another test at Columbia Teachers College, persons up to seventy could learn Russian and shorthand as easily as their younger classmates. The vital factor is that persons train their thinking ability when young and keep such active through use through the years. This matter has also been tested strictly physically by the young Danish doctor, Niels A. Lassen, who showed that, unlike other physical functions that deteriorate with age, there is no lessening of the brain’s assimilation and consumption of oxygen and hence possibility of mental activity with advancing age.