Senior moments.

There are senior moments and senior moments. Have you had one lately? You know. You'll be talking along like at any other time in your life, and suddenly you can't remember the name of your best friend. Or the movie you saw last night. Or what you ate for lunch an hour ago? It's a sudden, embarrassing slice of silence. A senior moment.

There are others which cause more distress- like the time you were searching for your house key in Delhi when it was in Washington, or going through red lights because they looked green, or when it was easier to say “that thing” than recall a proper noun. All these senior moments creep up on you from the time you are say 50 but they become causes of concern only when your children are around you saying “Dad” or “Mom” in embarrassed tones or muttering Alzheimer’s under their breaths!

One explanation of these senior moments is the simple fact that our brains are overloaded after 50 or 60 years of input. Our brains bloat as the result of too much stuff in the head and so the forgetful symptoms begin manifesting. After all those years of cramming stuff into your head, it finally begins overflowing like a water glass unable to hold another drop without shedding something already there.

So the solution, this expert suggests, is to empty out what is already there to make enough room for more in your brain. Those dates you memorized in high school history class? They are still there, aren't they? Get rid of them. And all those kings and queens and wars aplenty. Forget them. Just think of the valuable space you will empty up. And those thousands of names back in there of folks you'll probably never even see again? There are probably hundreds of school chums alone stuck in the recesses of your head. Get rid of them. Don't worry. If they happen to be at your next high school reunion, they'll be wearing nametags. You won’t miss a thing or a name. But what we really need is a three monthly clean up system – like changing oil in a car- just dump all the irrelevant stuff out of your brain on a regular basis. You can then really enjoy the feeling of a full and often useful brain.

But seriously research now shows how you can avoid these senior moments. Besides the usual admonitions of walking for an hour, sleeping for eight, and keeping an active social life, experts advise that you need to avoid depression. Depression, they say, saturates our bodies with high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, which can damage regions of the brain crucial to memory. A new study in Neuro-Image shows that when people brainstorm without editing their ideas, more blood flows to a memory-processing area of the brain. Growing evidence also shows that people who drink moderately are at lower risk for cognitive decline and dementia. Wines in particular seem to help with the memory. Crosswords are another excellent form of mental gymnastics, provided that you can (a) find where you last put down your glasses,(b) find the newspaper and (c) complete the crossword. Studies have shown that people who do crossword puzzles four days per week have a 48 per cent lower risk of developing dementia than those who did no crosswords at all. And best of all, eat dark chocolate- people who down a cocoa drink have a 50 percent increase in the blood streaming into memory centers of the brain.

And most importantly do not confuse these senior moments with the dreaded onset of Alzheimer's disease. It is true that Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, affects 5.2 million Americans and is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States. But it is a long way from a senior moment to loss of memory or dementia .

Shakespeare called memory “the warder of the brain,” charged with keeping watch over an individual’s personal account of being. Today scientists describe four memory systems that process incoming information for storage and retrieval. The systems are episodic, semantic, procedural, and working. The episodic memory system is involved in remembering personal experiences, such as a phone conversation you had yesterday or the movie you watched last week. The semantic memory system manages the storage and retrieval of general knowledge and facts, such as the number of days in a year or the colors in a rainbow. The procedural memory system allows us to learn activities and skills that will then be performed automatically with little or no conscious thought. Examples are riding a bicycle or driving a car. The working memory system governs our ability to pay attention and concentrate, and it enables us to temporarily keep needed information in mind (such as a phone number or the directions to a restaurant). But according to the latest research memories are not stored in the hippocampus or, for that matter, in any other single site in the brain. Instead, they are stored throughout the brain.

It is normal, as we grow older, to have more difficulty recalling names or choosing the right word, experts tell us. But such garden-variety forgetfulness — formally called "normal age-related forgetfulness" (NARF) or more popularly “senior moments” — must be clearly distinguished from Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia. The normal forgetfulness of older age may be frustrating, but it is not disabling like dementia. And you should know the difference.
Here are some examples of the differences between normal age-related forgetfulness and dementia: (courtesy 2008 Johns Hopkins White Paper about memory):

• A person with NARF may at times misplace keys, eyeglasses, or other items; a demented person forgets what these items are used for or puts them in inappropriate places.

• Someone with NARF may momentarily forget the name of an acquaintance; a demented individual may not remember knowing that person.

• A person with NARF may on occasion forget to run an errand; persons with dementia, because they do not know what day or time it is, cannot run any errands at all.

• People with NARF may joke about their forgetfulness; demented people are unaware of their memory loss.

• While driving, a person with NARF may briefly forget when to make a turn; a demented individual can easily get lost even in a familiar place.

A common guideline is that people who worry about their forgetfulness are unlikely to be suffering from a serious memory abnormality. People with a serious impairment of memory tend to be unaware of their memory problems, don't worry about them, or else blame other factors when memory lapses are brought to their attention.

In short, you need not worry if you forget where you put your car keys; you only need to worry if you forget what they’re used for. If you worry about losing your mind, you probably still have it!