For any Baby Boomer who has ever said, "Has anyone seen my keys?"... "What did I come in here for?"...or "His name is on the tip of my tongue," Where Did I Leave My Glasses? is the tailor-made book. According to Martha Weinman Lear and the top memory experts she taps in the book, the memory lapses that begin in middle age are typically no cause for alarm. In other words: You're normal! In fact, remembering less in later years is rarely a sign of Alzheimer's or any other scary memory-loss condition. It's just a part of normal aging.

On her hunt for answers, Lear explores why names are the first things to go and what can be done about it, why we forget certain things on purpose, why we forget more than our parents did and in which cases our brains are actually doing us a favor by letting go of certain knowledge. Weaving together fascinating insight from psychologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary biologists with rich and often hilarious anecdotes, Lear explores the whys and wherefores of garden-varuiety memory loss, and, in the process, offers reassurance and hope to the millions of forgetful baby boomers.

It is a comfort - NOT total, but I'll take whatever I can get - to know that we're all in this together, complaining more about remembering less.

I say all advisedly. It does not mean everyone. It means us: those of us who keep forgetting people's names or where we put the car keys or what we were just about to say. It means those of us who keep having those moments that are called, in the fullness of our American genius for euphemism, tip-of-the-tongue moments. If you are not yet plagued by such moments, you shouldn't be reading this book. It is not for you. Yet.

As for us: Let me tell you that, tip-of-the-tongue-wise, we are the world. The Italians say, "Sulla punta della lingua." The Spaniards say, "Al punto de la lengua." The French, who usually do not like sounding like everyone else, sound just like everyone else when they say, "Sur le bout de la langue." The Swedes say, "Jag har det pa tungan.". The Croations say, "Na vrhu Jezika mi je," and the Dutch say, "Op het puntje van mijn tong," though meaning "it's stuck in the throat.".

This cheers me. Not that forgetfulness in itself is a rib tickler - not, at least, to those of us who do the forgetting - but I do find something intrinsically funny in the idea of a global chorus wailing "What was I just going to say? It's on the tip of my tongue." how's that for a babel of tongues?

Consider our own memory situations, yours and mine. Here is mine:

Adjective elude me. Verbs escape me. Nouns, especially proper nouns, totally defeat me. I may meet you at a party, have a long, lovely conversation with you, be charmed by you, want to know you forever, and a day later not remember your name. (Do not feel offended. It is not your problem. However, if you do not remember my name, I promise you that I will feel offended.)

Often I cannot remember what I had for dinner last night, never mind what my husband and I discussed while we ate it. But I can report with reasonable accuracy that our dinner table conversations, these days, proceed more or less like this.

"I started to tell you something."

"What?"

"I can't remember."

Or:

"I saw whatsisname today."

"Who?"

"You know. Whatsisname."

"Oh. Where?"

And those are the better moments.

Some memory experts, of whom I have interviewed a slew, say that the problem is due mainly to the way we live: We're all on overload.

"I start going to the kitchen." a geriatric specialist tells me, "and meanwhile I'm thinking about preparing for my hospital rounds and calling the computer repair guy and dropping stuff off at the cleaner's on the way to work, and by the time I get to the kitchen, I've completely forgotten why I'm there." And this is a mere lass of forty-three.

In other words, they say, memory loss is not because we're getting older, it's simply because we have too much on our minds.

Do not believe them. It's because we're getting older.

(A cautionary note: I urge you strongly to accept this fact so that, if you should move to the country and sit moldering on the back porch, no hospital rounds, no stuff for the cleaner, no computer repair, and find that you still can't remember your neighbor's dog's name, you won't be too disappointed.)

Among my friends, who have been my friends for decades and range mostly from mid-boomer to early old age, it's the same story. We gather in a living room to watch, say, the Academy Awards - several of us insisting, as we do each year, that we watch only to see the gowns 0 and then somebody says, "That actress with the big lips - what's her name? I always forget her name," and somebody else says, "You're asking me?" and a third says, "I can't remember a thing anymore," and a fourth says, "Get in line," and we all laugh merrily. Much too merrily.

Because what unnerves us all, of course, is the specter of Alzheimer's disease. "My God, I must be getting Alzheimer's," we say to one another. With that same edgy little ha-ha, just to show that we are joking. More or less.

A year before I began to write this book, I found myself joking less. I had a bad case of what is not just a common phrase but a term actually used by memory researchers: tip of the tongue (TOT) syndrome.

It was not simply the obvious, such as people's names and To Do lists, that were becoming increasingly elusive but the thought process itself, sequences of thought, and as a nonfiction writer whose central task is to take a mass of research and organize it in a fluid way, moving with logic and hopefully a bit of grace from points A to B to C, I was no trilled with this development. I would be working on a magazine article, and the perfect way to segue from one paragraph to the next would flash suddenly into my consciousness like a thousand-watt bulb, and then, pouf, out, gone, good-bye, and it was driving me batty.

In addition to which, often I could not see what I was writing because I could not find my eyeglasses. The title of this book, let me tell you, is a phrase carved into my soul.

© Martha Weinman Lear

Tags: Memory Improvement, Aging, Midlife

About the Author

Martha Weinman Lear has written two books, Heartsounds and The Child Worshippers, and scores of articles for national magazines. She lives in New York with her husband, the screenwriter Albert Ruben, and says that, as best she can recall, they have no pets.