Dr. Ellen Langer

If you only know one thing, it's probably easy to remember it.

But at any rate, they see themselves forget, and then they worry, are they going to get dementia?

And so that worrying helps facilitate more forgetting because now you're not taking in the information.

You're worried about whether you're going to be able to retain it and so on.

And then you withdraw a little from other people because you don't want to be seen this way and it just snowballs.

rather than recognize that when you were young, you probably weren't infrequently forgetful either.

So I teach a health course at Harvard, a big lecture class, and I teach it on Tuesdays and Thursday mornings.

And on Thursday, before I'm going to do the health lecture, I ask the students, what was the last thing I said on Tuesday?

Nobody knows.

The thing is, the difference is when you're 21,

You don't care that you don't remember.

When you're 70, you know, oh my goodness, is this the beginning of the end?

So let's take the word try.

Okay.

Well, try sounds good, right?

It's certainly better than giving up.

I'm going to try.

But you wouldn't try to eat an ice cream cone.

You just need it, right?

So trying has built into it an expectation for failure.