Our memories are more precious than gold. Without the ability to remember, our ability to learn anything, to know who we are, to benefit more from past experiences, to use advice from others, or even how to take care of ourselves and survive is in serious jeopardy. The importance of memory cannot be overstated. There are normal and abnormal changes in the ability to remember that can occur as we age. How do psychologists define memory? Memory is the ability to save and store information or what we have experienced, to be used right away or later when the information is needed. Memory allows us to learn from the past and to plan for the future. The ability to comprehend is based on having enough stored information to put together to understand something. There are different types of memory. The two types that are relevant to this article are episodic memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory involves memories of things that you have experienced in your past. It allows a person to remember what they have done, places they have been and what they thought or felt at those times. Think of it as your stored autobiography. Semantic memory is stored facts, dates, concepts, rules, general knowledge and the meanings of words. It is like the material you learn in school. In normal aging episodic memory will typically decline, while semantic memory tends to be preserved. That depends, however, on the person. Researchers suggest that issues with episodic memory tend to kick in at about age sixty, but that can vary in different studies. Besides head trauma or some type of illness, other factors that can contribute to normal memory decline can be medication, not getting enough sleep, inadequate nutrition, long-term stress, an unstimulating environment, using street drugs and alcohol, depression, anxiety, and more. Actually, a person’s lifestyle can have a lot to do with when or how age-related decline develops. Lifestyle can impact whether successful memory aging will be the case. How are people who have successful memory aging, versus people who are not doing so well, identified? One way that is frequently used by psychologists are psychological tests. There are very sophisticated tests that look at different types of memory and the status of each of them. The tests allow psychologists to have accurate, age-specific information to sort through conditions that are similar to the real problem. Then they can develop the best plan for therapy. Of particular interest is the status of episodic memory. People who age successfully maintain their memory as the years go by. One way to identify the people who are doing very well is to compare a person’s memory test scores with the normative (average) scores of different age groups. If an 80-year-old’s scores are about the same as the average 50-year-old’s,then that person is aging very successfully. If the scores are at what is normal for an 80-year-old, that person is probably doing just fine. As usual, different studies can produce different results. The range of people who age successfully is from six to forty percent. The trick is to keep and maintain what you have. Again, lifestyle and genetics can influence whether a person is on par with younger age groups, or if he or she can maintain stable memory long past sixty and much longer. Do what you can to increase the probability of maintaining stable cognition and memory over your span of life.