WASHINGTON (AP) — Any parent who has ever called one of their children by the other’s name — or even by the name of the family pet — could probably empathize when President Joe Biden mixed up the names of French leaders Macron and Mitterrand.
The human brain has difficulty retrieving names from saturated memory banks at the right time. But when are these and other verbal missteps normal, and when can they be a sign of cognitive problems?
“When I see someone make a mistake on television, I’m really not worried,” said S. Jay Olshansky, a well-known aging researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “What science tells you about mistakes is that they are perfectly normal and are certainly exacerbated by stress.”
Biden, 81, has a decades-long history of verbal gaffes. But they are attract new attention after a special advocate last week I decided Biden should not face criminal charges for his handling of classified documents – while describing it as a old man who has trouble remembering dateseven the date on which he son Beau died.
This prompted a Biden visibly angry to attack the White House, saying: “My memory is good. » As for his son’s death in 2015 from brain cancer, “Frankly, when I was asked that, I thought it was none of their business,” Biden said.
Biden is not the only candidate to make verbal errors. Former President Donald Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in November’s presidential election, also did so. Last month, Trump, 77, routed his main adversary for the GOP nomination, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, along with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Health experts caution that neither verbal gaffes nor a lawyer’s opinions can reveal whether a person is cognitively impaired. This requires medical tests.
But some problems are common at any age.
“Remembering names easily, in the moment, is the hardest thing to do accurately,” said Dr. Eric Lenze of Washington University in St. Louis, a geriatric psychiatrist who assesses cognition in people elderly.
Some studies have suggested that “misnaming” can occur on a daily basis when the brain has names stored by category – such as members of your family or perhaps in Biden’s case, world leaders he has known for a long time – and chooses the wrong one. Or, the error may be phonetic, since the names of the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, and former president François Mitterrand both begin with “M.” Mitterrand died in 1996.
As for dates, emotion can mark some memories but not ordinary memories, like the special prosecutor’s questions about when Biden handled a box of documents.
“Assigning a calendar date to an event is not really something the human brain does at any age,” Lenze said. It’s “not like a spreadsheet.”
Whether it’s a name, a date or something else, memory can also be affected by stress and distractions – if someone is thinking about more than one thing, said Olshansky. And while everyone has had an “it’s on the tip of their tongue” mistake, mistakes by presidents, or future presidents, tend to be caught on television.
Olshansky watches tapes of his presentations at scientific meetings and “there’s not a single time I don’t make a mistake,” he said. “I’m 69, which I don’t consider old, but I made the same mistakes at 39.”
It’s reasonable for people to wonder whether leaders in their 70s and 80s remain sharp, Lenze said. What is reassuring is that on the whole, what someone says is generally accurate despite a verbal gaffe.
Some cognitive aging is normal, including a delay in memory recovery. People’s brains age differently, and heart health, blood pressure and physical activity play a role in brain health.
And even though Trump often boasts pass a screening-type memory test Several years ago, Lenze said the best assessment included rigorous neuropsychological testing.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Education Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
