Are you losing your senses?

Move your mouse over Einstein's face to find out what happens to our senses as we age.

Smell

Your sense of taste depends heavily upon your olfactory sense—how well you smell. (Just try putting something into your mouth without inhaling.) Some older adults have a weakened sense of smell, likely because of a problem like sinus and nasal blockage.

Vision

In your 30s, your pupils begin to decrease in size and in response time to light, so you need three times the amount of light to see as a younger person would. Focusing takes longer, and you're more likely to be nearsighted.

The lens of your eye will thicken and yellow, which diffracts light. By 40, your lenses may be too stiff for your eye muscles to focus on near objects. You might look into glasses. While you may develop cataracts and glaucoma as you grow old, they aren't normal effects of aging.

So protect your eyes—wear sunglasses!

Taste

While your sense of smell shouldn't suffer, you'll lose a third of your taste buds by age 70. That dulls flavours, so you may find yourself pouring extra salt and pepper on your food.

Hearing

With age, some of the cells that turn sound vibrations into nerve impulses are lost, so older people have a harder time discriminating sounds with similar pitches, or hearing high frequency tones. And ear wax doesn't help—the sweat glands in the skin of the outer ear channel die off, ear wax becomes drier, and hard wax builds up and blocks out sound.

Touch

Elderly people's skin becomes less sensitive to sensations like heat, cold and injury, even as their bodies grow more sensitive to temperature changes. But touch is the sense least affected by age.