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Okay so yesterday, I was shopping with Sharon, and I decided to pick up a bottle of distilled water for my CPAP machine, but when I went to ask a worker at the store, the word "distilled" simply vanished from my vocabulary.
I was able to find where they had the bottles, but its very uncomfortable to be standing in front of someone asking for something, and then the word for that something wont come.
sighs . . .
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Senior Moment
Over here those are called Senior Moments.
It is not something that is specific to you or to anything that might (or might not) be wrong with you. It appears that they can increase as one gets older. Anyone who has had that "Why did I come into this room?" moment will know exactly what I mean.
I do not know if there is any way of improving memory recall in such cases. Possibly there is, but I can't think of it at the moment ;)
Welcome to the rest of your life.
Penny
i'm forever
doing that
It might be a word, an open cupboard, an aisle in a shop, our brains just can't cope with keeping everything ready for immediate access, sometimes there's a glitch. It might be little used information, names are my real bogey so i can describe a route for example but the place/street names just pass me by! If you can recall evereything all the time its my opinion that you don't know enough!
Whether you call it a senior moment, or anything else, personally i always blame being blonde, its just one of those things.
So don't worry, you are not alone.
Madeline Anafrid Bell
Happens to all of us
It's frustrating. I've observed it from my youth. My brother (about 16 at the time) once couldn't remember a word while he was talking to me and said, "It's right on the tip of my tongue; can you read it?" and stuck his tongue out.
As to the "why did I come in here" question: I've experience it. Thankfully, it's not all the time. Just yesterday I went into a room and knew immediately why I went in there... but it was the bathroom, so maybe that doesn't count.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
it
was the visual clue that gave it away!
Madeline Anafrid Bell
Me too...
Long, long ago when I was a teenager I once spent 30 minutes trying to remember then name 'Coca-Cola'. Since then I have had similar experiences a few times, with other products or words, but not often enough to worry me.
Unless, of course, I forget so often that I can't remember forgetting...
Lindsay
Towel
Once when I was in high school, I was taking a shower, and when I finished, I discovered that my mother had taken all the towels to be washed. Not wanting to drip all the way to the linen closet, which was not close, I yelled to my mother, "Mom, I need a" and stopped, because I could not remember the word "towel". I spent several minutes trying. It was very disconcerting.
A Peculiar One
Fortunately, this particular one only happened when I was talking to myself, or imagining talking to someone. My thoughts were running, "Oh darn, forgot the name. The man behind the Achilles heel. Oh, right. Achilles."
-- Daphne Xu
Lol,
I love that!
Shouldn't it have been
the man IN FRONT of the Achilles heel?
I was having a Meds check...
... over the phone the other day and was being asked why I had this or that drug and just as I was about to say 'transgendered', it was gone.
I tried to think of all the words used to describe ones state and they were all gone too, I was both stunned and embarrassed and just made a series of noises as I tried to remember the words to described being transgendered. I only remembered them about five minutes after the phone call ended and then they were just back as if they had never been missing.
I have never had a problem telling a medical person my transgendered state who did not know it. It was the shock of losing the words that so totally stunned me at the time.
Sophie
"Why did I come into this room?"
This is fairly common, and is >usually< a Good Thing. Computer geeks would call it a 'context switch'.
We finish talking to one friend, a bit later another friend comes along. {Switch} We don't continue the same topic we were on with the first friend. Or we are having a nice dinner and {Switch!} lion in the foyer! Books too. If I'm not quite ready for the impending mayhem in A, I will pick up book B.
We are in room A, go to take the scissors to where they belong in room B ... and find ourselves in the middle of room B wondering why we are holding scissors. .. In this case the A to B context switch was a little >too< complete. This is when we really notice. And get all flustered. In the words of Harry Potter's Headmaster: "... I find retracing my steps to be a wise place to begin. Good luck. ".
---
Wife and I had a kitty, we joked he had a 6-room brain in a 7-room house. Sometimes, he seemed to completely forget an entire room. He would come in in that creeping, ultra paranoid, ready-to-run way that cats have. "Uhm ... Cinnamon, you've been living here for years, since you were a kitten ..."
---
As for misplaced words - especially talking to someone: try to get to synonyms or circumlocutions "clean water for my CPAP" ==> "boiled, purified, ultra-clean". And pushing harder to get the word seems to make it run away faster. (If I'm talking to someone, and they go "Huh?" twice in a row, I use different words for the third try.)
Down for Maintenance
I have hyperthymesia... near perfect autobiographical recall of every day of my life...
...and I once forgot how to spell "of"...
...and forgot how to tie a bow...
...and forgot the name of one of my friends... his name was CJ...
...and forgot my address...
...and forgot the word "desktop"... when I was working in IT...
It just happens. The brain misfires and suddenly a chunk of your vocabulary isn't available... it's Down for Maintenance... a 'mental block'.
The weird part is when you have one of those moments at the same time as someone else... and they can't remember the same thing! (this has actually happened often enough to my father and I that we refer to it as "You're transmitting!" (a mental block)
Isn't life weird?
::huggles::
Roberta
I always refer to those as
"Brain farts."
I forget my PIN number
I forget my PIN number sometimes, now thats's really annoying!
Leeanna
And
We are supposed to use unique passwords that we change regularly without writing them down!
I must go I want to go out on my, et, two thingy thing.
Madeline Anafrid Bell