Behavior studies have shown that ageing affects episodic encoding and retrieval processes in a negative way. Studies also show that young subjects benefit more than elderly subjects from the level of processing words to be remembered. These studies general concept is that it is more difficult for elderly people to encode new information as a result of physiological degradation of the brain. This degradation of the brain is just part of the ageing process. In this experiment they are testing the hypothesis that, younger people use the left frontal cortex during encoding and the right frontal lobes during retrieval and elderly people don't favor either side during the processes of encoding and retrieval.
Twenty right-handed males between thirty and thirty-five years old, as well as, forty right-handed males between ages sixty-three and seventy-one participated in the experiment. Out of these sixty males three groups were formed. The first group consisted of seventeen young males with normal memory recognition; the second group consisted of nineteen elderly males with normal memory recognition; and the third group had twenty-one elderly males with below normal memory recognition. 223 nouns ranging from three to twelve letters were taken from a Dutch dictionary and given to the patients to practice with during their first visit to the out-patient clinic. During this first visit they were also given the Mini-Mental State Examination or MMSE which is used to test comprehension. Within a week the subjects went back to the clinic and preformed an episodic memory task in the MRI while functional MRI data was taken. There were two main phases to this experiment encoding and retrieval. For the encoding phase there were eighty-one study words that the subjects had seen before and fifty-four baseline words. The subjects were instructed to indicate whether a noun shown on the screen gave them a pleasant of un-pleasant feeling by pressing a button on the left or right.
His diction becomes harsher and cautionary when he states, "The invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain- (490). ...
