Elderly Cognition – Case Study

In later years, as one’s short term memory begins to experience glitches, is seems a good idea to analyze what is behind it and how steep a decline to expect. Because of a diagnosis of normal pressure communicating hydrocephalus (largely asymptomatic), I am being tracked for some expected neuro-decline, via tri-annual neuropsychological testing. Medicine is already providing the analysis I desire, a fully covered expense. Following is my charted progress toward maintaining brain health. My Baseline Intellectual Functioning was measured by TOPF to be in the superior range. A further baseline is a GRE score of 1390 when I was 65.

Causes of memory ‘hiccups’ are inattention, distraction, response inhibition, and missed salience. Training one’s brain to multitask enables better awareness, concentration, and significance processing, all of which can mitigate such hiccups.

My neuropsychology testing falls into several categories, where the score is relative to people of like age, and compound scores refer to learning tests, where (1) is the score for immediate free recall, (2) is the score after some number of recall cues, if present, and (3) is the final score after a wait period of 20 minutes or so. Ditto means the prior test result was comparable.

______Function______	___Age 80___	___Age 78___	___Age 75___
Auditory Attention Skills	95	99	99
Complex Attention Skills	99	98	99
Speed of Mental Processing – SDMT	12 (tosser)	84
Speed of Mental Processing – Trails A	79	62
Verbal Memory – Structured Paragraph	50	50-50
Verbal Memory – Word List	45-96-99	ditto
Visual Memory – Simple Figure Reproduction	46-75-84	ditto
Visual Memory – Simutaneous Simple Figures	31-46-54	ditto
Language Functioning – Confrontational Object Naming	100	99
Language Functioning – Verbal Fluency – Phonemic	91	ditto
Language Functioning – Verbal Fluency – Semantic	37	75
Visiospatial Processing – Visual Puzzles	50	25
Visiospatial Processing – Block Design	81	ditto
Executive Function – Verbal Reasoning	81	ditto
Executive Function – Non-verbal Reasoning	94	ditto
Executive Function – Complex Problem Solving	62	ditto?
Executive Function – Cognitive Flexibility	91-99	ditto
Executive Function – Self-monitoring	84	ditto
Emotional Functioning (Psychometrics)	depression 0; anxiety 1	N/A

Knowing what I see now regarding my brain processing acumen, my GRE score looks astonishingly good. And I no longer feel discomfit regarding my poor school grades. I likely expected too much of myself. I will settle easily into my new identity as an average intellect. No regrets. Strangely, I have backed into this ordinariness through a combination of very high and quite low scores, some not entirely consistent. This is cause for wondering if it’s the test or my brain that’s developing holes.