Finally, Banks says, 'that information needs to get to your mouth.' These regions - the occipital lobe, the fusiform gyrus, the hippocampus and the temporal gyrus - are scattered throughout the brain. From there, it bounces around in the main memory's processing center, seeking out associations such as: Do I know her from an old job? Is he the dad of my kid's friend? Then it's off to the brain's language areas, which locate the random abstract sounds that form a person's name. That information then moves to the region of the brain responsible for recognizing faces. First, your eyes communicate with your brain's visual processing center. 'Information has to travel long distances very quickly in our brains,' says Sarah Banks, head of neuropsychology at the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas. To understand what is happening when we forget a person's name, for example, it's useful to look at what happens when we do remember. What it is not, he insists, is a sign of incipient Alzheimer's. Occasional forgetfulness is ordinary and expected, says Ronald Petersen, M.D., director of the Mayo Clinic Alzheimer's Disease Research Center. '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.īut 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.' I also freak out and worry that age is turning my brain to cheesecloth.Ĭall 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. 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.

Senior moment supplement