![]() ![]() Sacks said, "depends very much on personality. I could no longer make rapid connections between ideas, because I'd lost access to knowledge I'd already absorbed. Beyond the typical things - forgetting names, directions to places I'd been before - I found it harder to comprehend or retain complex reading material. Nearly 15 years ago, when I was pregnant with my first son, I realized that something was happening to my mind. To remember is to triumph over loss and death to forget is to form a partnership with oblivion." For anyone who works with quantities of data, a single note of forgetfulness can sound like a death knell. It is taken as weakness, an emblem of losing one's grip. "In an information age," writes Charles Baxter in a collection of essays called "The Business of Memory," "forgetfulness is a sign of debility and incompetence. But that is only one part of it: For people who have always been very competent, forgetting brings a disturbing sense of the loss of control and mastery." "Even momentary forgetting, quite benign, can be unduly upsetting, because there is general alarm around us. Oliver Sacks, the author and neurologist, when I asked him why we find cognitive lapses so worrisome. "We are hyper-alert about Alzheimer's disease," said Dr. When they are reminded that, for instance, one of the words is a type of fruit, they still lack the "aha!" experience that allows the average person to say, "Oh, yes, it was an orange." Individuals, even in the early stages of Alzheimer's, show a marked inability to remember a list of several words after a 20-minute delay. ![]() Neuropsychological tests can help tease out the difference between normal aging and pathology. ![]() But for most of us, the memory deficits we encounter in midlife reflect a common pattern of brain aging and are not thought to be predictive of the progressive degeneration that leads to dementia. To the person who has misplaced his keys three times in two days or just called a colleague by the wrong name, forgetfulness in middle age can feel like incipient Alzheimer's disease. We worry about decades of dependence, of life with a diminished mind trapped in a still vigorous body. Memory, the instrument we trusted to guide us, has instead betrayed us, making us deeply uncertain about our cognitive futures. At the heart of it, there is fear - cold, implacable anxiety, emerging from the suspicion that this is just the beginning. The feelings of embarrassment, frustration and anger that surround such middle-aged lapses serve to disguise a more primitive emotion. A freelance illustrator disclosed that he'd gone to work on Friday, completed a drawing for an editor and mailed it off, only to return on Monday to re-execute the identical assignment without any sense of déjà vu. A woman who publishes a local magazine noted that she'd just come from the bank, where she'd spent 10 minutes searching through her purse, briefcase and pockets for a check that she'd never written. In the space of one week, a psychologist remarked that she had turned over all social scheduling to her husband, at his insistence, because the couple had appeared at yet another dinner party on the wrong night. I take some comfort in the fact that I am not alone. I knew what she did for work, and the name of her Portuguese nanny. I remembered her backyard dotted with Little Tikes plastic play furniture. I had sat in her kitchen, discussing birthday parties. Our sons were best pals in nursery school and kindergarten. The minute I saw Sam's freckled face, the mystery was solved. "We've been to the orthodontist," she said. I was about to cut and run with a quick "nice to see you, too" when the rear window slid down, revealing a toothy grin. Fending off panic, I proceeded through a mental list: Work? School? Synagogue? I couldn't visualize her in these places. Apparently she was not a casual acquaintance. ![]() "So wonderful to see you," she said, inquiring by name after every member of my family, including the two dogs. Yet again, I had misplaced an entire human being. In my brain, the synaptic traces that connected us had frayed. Like quite a few others, she had slipped out of my mental Rolodex. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't place her. A few months ago, as I trudged down the stairs of my office building, deep in my thoughts, I noticed a dark-haired woman waving to me from the window of her car. ![]()
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