Alan Castel

@alan-castel · 24 positions · On ppll ↗

Professor of psychology at UCLA, where he studies human memory, attention and cognitive ageing, and author of Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging.

Alan Castel did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

What Alan Castel says most about

dementia 3

Alzheimer's pathology in the brain does not settle whether a person has dementia: the nuns' brains were full of plaques and tangles while they went on functioning normally.
Balance, not memory, is what middle-aged and older people should be worrying about, and almost nobody knows what state theirs is in.

See all 3

curiosity 2

Curiosity does not simply fade with age: the general disposition declines while curiosity aroused by a particular thing you care about actually increases.
Older adults are not worse rememberers so much as more selective ones: they keep what they were curious about and let the rest go.

See all 2

health and fitness 2

Walking three or four times a week grew older adults' hippocampus by one percent and left their memory better a year later, which no pill has managed.
Balance is highly trainable, and something as small as standing on one leg improves it measurably within a month or two.

See all 2