If this presidential cycle has unified us on anything, it might be that cognitive decline is a hard thing to talk about. Both President Biden and former President Trump face plenty of criticism, pundits playing armchair psychologists, and voter skepticism over their age and cognitive abilities. It seems at once fair game to ask about an impossible thing to answer. But cognitive researchers could have told you that.
If you look to science, you’ll find that cognitive aging is not a uniformly downhill slope that inevitably ends with something like dementia. And our understanding of cognitive aging is still incomplete. “This is really an emerging area of research,” says Ana Daugherty, a cognitive neuroscientist specializing in aging at Wayne State University. “There's just so much that we still don't know.”
