column AGEING WELL
Ageing and memory
DR MICHAEL ELSTEIN is a Sydney-based anti-ageing physician and writer. He is the author of three books including his latest, The Wellness Guide to Preventing the Diseases of Ageing. He has also designed the app The Diet Guide to Ageing Prevention.
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Names become harder to remember because they … usually aren’t bound to the activation of any of your senses, which makes their retrieval less available.
I’m constantly freaked out by my tip-of-the-tongue memory shortfalls. My inability to instantly remember well-known celebrities, formerly immediately accessible but now hiding in the recesses of my failing memory, is a terrifying signal that my once adroit brain might be sliding into irreversible degeneration. This was until I read Lisa Genova’s book Remember.
Relax, it’s normal
She’s also the author of Still Alice, the harrowing depiction of relentless mental decay that befalls an acclaimed linguistics professor at Columbia University, which won an Oscar for a much-celebrated Hollywood actress (her name at the end of this article, a tip-of-the-tongue test).