It’s on the tip of my tongue
In which the author muses on memory and aging in this age of distraction
Carol Burt (a Medium writer whose work I follow avidly) recently wrote about memory. She shared the distress that comes with aging and discovering that her memory is apparently not as robust as it used to be.
Her piece rang lots of bells with me. Get to a certain age, and every memory glitch is a suggestion that the dreaded spectre of senility is inching closer. It’s most obvious when I forget a name, or when a common word seems to disappear from my internal dictionary.
I’ve even come up with a joke to cover up — I say that my internal filing system is so full after all these years that it takes the librarian longer to retrieve things. That I’m considering upgrading to digital.
None the less, I like to think of myself as a rational, evidence-based sort of person, so I decided to take a quick dive into this question: Is the relationship concurrent (worry about memory loss occurring at the same time as awareness of aging) or causal (aging causing memory loss?)
Using the easiest (and possibly least scientific) research technique at hand, I asked Google for some thoughts on the subject, which led me to a site directed at seniors called Hellalife. They offered an article about failure to remember a desired word at a desired…
