This Week @ Harvard Health

4 ways to improve focus and memory

Normal aging leads to gradual changes in many skills associated with thinking and memory. For example, you might find it harder to focus your attention and absorb information quickly. The slowdown in processing can lead to a bottleneck of information entering your short-term memory, reducing the amount of information that can be acquired and encoded into long-term memory.

Get your copy of Improving Memory

By age 60, more than half of adults have concerns about their memory. However, minor memory lapses that occur with age are not usually signs of a serious problem, such as Alzheimer’s disease, but rather the result of normal changes in the structure and function of the brain. This report describes these normal age-related changes and other more serious causes of memory loss — and how to distinguish between them.

Tossing flossing?

The burning question in the news recently was this: should you bother flossing? The answer for decades has been “of course.” And it’s likely you’ve heard something similar from your dentist. But, while the importance of flossing may have been widely accepted, the evidence supporting it turns out to be surprisingly thin.

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Improving Memory

Featured content:

•	What is memory?
•	How we remember
•	Forgetting: What's normal?
•	How memory changes with age
•	Memory impairment: Normal aging or brain disease?
•	... and more!