n the crowded,
frantic atmosphere of a Bingo parlor, an elderly woman keeps track of
two dozen cards, deftly checking through them as the numbers are called,
quickly marking off the figures in the appropriate columns.
No way this woman could have a memory problem.
But, in fact, she could. She is not demonstrating an excellent memory, but an excellent skill.
Many regular Bingo players develop automatic skills, explains Anderson Smith, a cognitive psychologist and associate dean of the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech. They can compensate for slower reaction time by knowing in which vertical rows the numbers fall.
"Elderly people may have memory problems, but they can certainly learn," Smith says. "If you practice something for a very long time, you develop a skill. You can look at any skill, and if you devote enough energy to it and enough time to it, you can learn to do that very, very well."
Playing Bingo is one way some elderly people keep mentally active, Smith says. But being mentally active does not mean someone will not experience poor memory.
"What I cannot say is that if you play Bingo or do crossword puzzles, your memory will not change," Smith states.
"Certainly someone who does crossword puzzles or reads all the time is going to stay mentally active."
But someone can be mentally active and still experience memory problems, he says.
"There's a notion that if you don't use it, you'll lose it," he says. But that may not apply to the brain. "The brain is not a muscle that atrophies. In fact, we use our brain no matter what we are doing.
"Skills become automatic and don't take a whole lot of attention. The more you practice, the more components of that skill become automatic. For that reason, many skills are not affected much by aging."