Aging and the Changing Landscape of Memory

Scott A. Small, the Boris and Rose Katz Professor of Neurology, director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center in the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain, and member of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science, participated in a roundtable interview conducted by the Kavli Foundation to discuss the link between the brain's ability to make new cells and age-related memory loss.

Dr. Small and two other neuroscientists—Fred “Rusty” Gage of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Craig Stark of the University of California, Irvine—discussed what researchers hope to learn in coming years about the changing landscape of memory as people age.

“We now know that the dentate gyrus is important for a particular kind of memory called pattern separation, which allows us to distinguish things that are similar, like faces, but also clearly distinct,” says Dr. Small. “Anytime I hear a person say, ‘Gee whiz, I'm having a hard time remembering names of people’—assuming they don't have Alzheimer's—it certainly is a declaration that something is up in the dentate gyrus.”

Read the full interview at the Kavli Foundation website.