Memory problems? Leaving the house without your glasses or keys? Want to stop worrying about it?

Getting scared that it might be the slippery slope to dementia when you forget a familiar phone number?

Well stop worrying. Instead, it’s time to get some info about why it’s happening. A little information goes a long way to banish fear. And a little information will give us some perspective about memory problems.

What baseball players and fighter pilots can teach us about perspective
Ask yourself, do you expect to apply to be a fighter pilot at age fifty or sixty?

Very unlikely.

But you don’t worry about it either, do you? You don’t assume you’re all washed up because you can’t pilot a fighter airplane.

Do you expect that your favorite baseball players will still be able to hit them out of the park as well when they’re fifty as they did at thirty?

Of course not.

And nobody expects that fighter pilots will keep on careening their airplanes around the sky at fifty and sixty.

But we don’t think they’re washed up at life.

Reflexes may slow down somewhat, but we can still function very well.

So let’s cut ourselves some slack on memory problems the same way we do with physical reflexes.
Slower processing time doesn’t mean that we now have irreversible memory problems, that it’s all over, that it’s the slippery slope to dementia.

It just means that memory processing and retrieval time is getting slower.

Take another example.

Research done on people over sixty shows that they perform just as well on IQ tests given enough time.

In other words, their intellectual “reflexes” may have slowed down. But they haven’t become stupider, or unable to think.

Our task is to acknowledge these facts and work around them.

A quick primer on types of memory

• Immediate memory: An example would be remembering a phone number long enough to dial it.
• Short term memory. An example would be keeping a mental list of a few groceries to pick up.
• Long term memory: An example would be to remember the names of the first cousins you hardly ever see.
• Remote memory: An example would be to remember a nursery rhyme you learned at the age of 4.

• Environmental distractions
• Poor diet and exercise
• Stress
• DepressionSome medications
• Perceptual problems such as vision or hearing problems that prevent us from fully taking things in
• Inattention
• Heightened emotion such as anxiety, as for example when you go to the doctor with a worry and don’t really take in all the answers

About 50% of memory problems are not forgetfulness at all
Remember that you need to take in the sensory input to form the memory. If you aren’t seeing or hearing as well as you could, then you won’t form as sharp memories.

You never memorized the information in the first place because you didn’t stop and focus long enough to store it.

The external environment can distract you, but so can your internal environment. Worry, anxiety, depression, all prevent us from focussing.

The lesson is clear. We can prevent and work around memory problems.