Question: why does peoples long term memery start to let less memorys in as people get older?

Nadine Mirza answered on 2 Nov 2018:

This is a really smart question!

Actually, our long term memory has infinite storage space! The problems occur because as we grow older it becomes harder to access this storage space. Even though we have the room to store as many long term memories as we want (like in the hippocampus) we start having trouble accessing this area as we grow older because the pathways to this area begin to break down. This is because as we grow older parts of our brain start slowly shrinking or blood doesn’t reach these parts.
It becomes harder for short term memories to become long term and get stored because they can’t reach these parts of the brain and it becomes harder to get to the long term memories we already have.
Of course, this isn’t the only reason but it is a big one!