Staying Fit
I've always had a noun problem. Especially proper nouns.
When I was in my 30s, my husband used to tease me. "That actress, in that movie, about that thing?" he'd say. Or sometimes: "You know, that thing about that thing?" His imitations were spot-on but didn't faze me. We'd laugh off these momentary memory lapses as another idiosyncrasy he found endearing — like tilting my head when someone takes my picture.
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Fast-forward nearly three decades. These days, my inability to summon the name of a celebrity or even the woman I see every week in yoga class isn't funny — it's embarrassing, especially if the person whose name I'm forgetting is walking toward me. I also freak out and worry that age is turning my brain to cheesecloth.
Call these what you want: a brain freeze, a mind blip or that ageist and insulting standby, "a senior moment." Whatever term you use, these little lapses become more alarming the older we get. "Tip-of-the tongue experiences — when you can't retrieve a word or name you know — are older adults' number-one memory complaint," says Deborah Burke, professor of linguistics and cognitive science at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif.
But no need to panic: These memory glitches can crop up as early as in our 20s — I can attest to that — though their frequency undeniably increases as the years pass and, as Burke somewhat bluntly puts it, "we lose gray matter."
Occasional forgetfulness is ordinary and expected, says Ronald Petersen, M.D., director of the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. What it is not, he insists, is a sign of incipient Alzheimer's.
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