Working memory: the surprising decline of dementia

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  The Economist.

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  Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.

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  I'm Jason Palmer.

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  Today on the show, the one person who hates Brazil's beloved digital payment system,

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  and proof that emo music wasn't just a phase.

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  But first,

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  there are lots of things we can all expect to lose as we grow older:

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  muscle mass, flexibility, deft use of the latest technology.

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  But what really inspires fear is the possibility of losing memory,

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  possibly losing oneself altogether to dementia.

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  Happily, a close look at the data suggests there's steadily less and less reason to worry.

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  There has just been this absolutely astonishing decline in the rates of dementia over the past 40 years.

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  Jonathan Rosenthal is an international correspondent at The Economist.

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  So just to give you an example, between 1988 and 2015,

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  the share of older people with dementia fell by 13% a decade

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  across six countries in North America and Europe.

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  But perhaps even more staggering, in the 1980s,

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  three in every 10 people in their late 80s had dementia,

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  and that rate has now gone down to roughly one in 10.

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  But it also seems as if a lot of the declines seem to be happening in richer countries,

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