One day we look into the mirror and we see our mother looking back. I've always looked like my mother, so this has not been such a shock over the years. But now I find myself saying and doing the same thing I remembering her doing when she was my age and that has been...well... unsettling.
When my mom was in her 50's she use to look at me in the middle of a conversation about a TV show or a movie ( safe topics for mothers and teens back then) and she'd say, "you know the guy who was in the movie with what's her name. The one who was in the TV show about the two women who work at the factory..."
The description of the associations took longer than the point she was trying to make. She could remember the plot detail, but not the character's or actor's name. Sometimes she would run through my siblings names before landing on mine, or she would forget the name of a common thing, or even where she put that common whatchamacallit thingy doodad.
I find that most of my conversations begin the same lately, with forgotten names of people, places, or things. Remembering facts ( like 2 + 2 =4 ) is called semantic memory and mine is slipping.
Episodic memory is our personal history. The memories that are unique to us.Who we met with yesterday, what we talked about, and what we ate for lunch. The combination of semantic (factual) with episodic (personal) is referred to as declarative memory.
Procedural memory is what we do regularly and automatically. How to feed ourselves, tie our shoes, and so forth. So far so good on that one, although occasionally my food misses my mouth and lands on my shirt. This is of course happens only when I have on nice clothes. So, it could be more related to anxiety than memory.
As we age we begin to loose some of our semantic and episodic memories. It is not that important to
our survival to remember all the details of an encounter we had at lunch yesterday,
but it is important to remember what lunch is and how to eat it.
I had no idea when I was a kid why my mother could not remember what I told her. I found playing twenty questions and this new verbal charades ("you know, it's yellow and looks like a lemon...") was annoying and required talking to her more than was allowed in my teen handbook.
Now here I am, these oh so many decades, later struggling to remember where I put that file I had in my hand two seconds ago and the name of the actor who appeared in the movie about fighting ( Fight Club) and he's married to the woman with all the kids ( Angelina Jolie) and they just had twins and he was in that other movie with the guy who was in ER( George Clooney) and...
Losing our memory is a natural process and doesn't mean we have, or are going to get Alzheimer's. However, it is disconcerting to notice that things that rolled easily off our tongue, now get stuck somewhere between our brain and our throat.
There is a wonderful book by New York Times writer, Martha Weinman Lear called, "Where did I Leave My Glasses?" Brain functioning and memory are fascinating reading, but it can be very complicated without prior knowledge of the topic. Lear manages to explain how our memory works from a variety of perspectives without becoming overly technical. It is a fun read and very normalizing and comforting if you feel that you might be loosing too many of your basic brain cells.
In case you were wondering who I was referring to, two paragraphs above; the actor in Fight Club was, Brad Pitt.
