I have lost my way driving to: my dentist’s new office (the fourth time I went there), the dealership where I bought my car (the second time I took it in for service, but the dealership’s just a few miles away from my childhood home, and it’s been there for decades), and my brother’s house.
Typically, it’s when I’m distracted or tired, but it’s something I’m trying to keep an eye on.
See, I have it easy there. You can’t worry about losing an ability you never had!
Does anyone else Of A Certain Age notice that it’s getting harder to fake it under suboptimal conditions? I never did my best thinking under stress or when I was distracted or hadn’t gotten enough sleep, but nowadays it really affects my ability to remember and do complex tasks.
I’ve watched two movies lately that I have watched before. Problem is, I didn’t remember having already seen them until the final 15 minutes of each film. Putting names to faces has always been a problem for me, so that’s nothing new.
Human memory can be a mystery. I can watch a movie and then spend twenty minutes giving you a detailed synopsis of what happened but, when you ask me the name of the movie, I can’t remember the 2 or 3 word name of the movie.
I can’t remember how to spell correctly. I turned it into a game. I will know it’s not right and maybe jiggle some letters around and when it looks right I google it and see how close I was.
It’s your money, but the objective evidence is pretty much that you will end up with expensive urine (i.e. it doesn’t do anything, just gets digested and passes through your body). Any anecdotal testimonial is likely a combination of wishful thinking and confirmation bias.
My most frequent memory issue is reaching for and not finding a word or product name or something, especially ones that I have just recently read or used myself, even within a few minutes. I have developed a routine of thinking of related words, thinking of the context in which I last heard of or used it, and so on. Sometimes I resort to a thesaurus for a particular word I can’t think of but want to use (or google for a product). I’d say my success rate in the short term is about 75%, but it nearly always comes to me later if I wasn’t able to think of it at the time.
I have noticed a considerable reduction in this problem since I have lost weight and become more active. It is my personal opinion that mental sluggishness of the kind I have described is made worse by physical sluggishness, combined with age, and that there is no easy solution for either.