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Notes:
Adulthood is a time of physical stability: changes in our physical and mental capacities are subtle, and are related to use or disuse rather than simply to senescence.
Disuse causes loss of function in many body systems:
muscles
bones
sinews
are the most obvious and well understood.
Review answers the issue of conceptual forgetting.
Practice answers the issue of motor forgetting.
Often deficiencies of performance are falsely blamed on aging that are really due to disuse or inattention.
Many of the normal errors of memory or thinking are wrongly or facetiously blamed on aging.
Most research attempts to describe the characteristics of senescence tather than the changes of aging: aging is not senescence!! Aging ends in senescence.
Aging is genetically programmed and irreversible, involving slow and subtle changes.