Monday 21 March 2011

Cognitive Deterioration, Baby Brain or just getting OLD?

Sometimes I worry I may be losing my mind (OK los-ing and sometimes might be slightly optimistic but bear with me here).

Over the weekend I was reminded of this on two separate occasions. I came downstairs with a little pile of rubbish in my hand and went to put it in the fridge. And later, when putting washing on, I almost put cat food in the detergent drawer instead of washing liquid. The latter thankfully I realised what I was doing before I did it, that could have been a costly mistake.

And these were not isolated incidents.

How often do I get to the top of the stairs and wonder, what the hell was I coming up here for? 

I've also started getting peoples names wrong. My grandmother used to say the first syllable of every family member's name before she hit on the person she was addressing. Everyone would stop in their tracks when she started speaking, pausing their activity to see if she would stop at their name or sail past to the next one. My mum does it. Now I have started to do it to. And it's not just family, I do it with friends too. Friend's kids names are particularly interchangeable.

Often, especially in shops when I have to ask for what I want, I'll be practising in my head what I'm going to say then when I get to the front of the queue it comes out all garbled and wrong,. So I have to stop, compose myself and repeat it, the irritatingly young person behind the counter looking frustrated at my lack of ability to communicate effectively.

Is it baby brain, nappy fever, whatever you want to call it? Or is it simply (scarily)... age?

I'm aging pretty well for the most part. I have a few grey hairs. Mercifully few enough that I still have to search for them. Although when I do finally find one I am hit with the crippling dilemma whether or not to pull it out, just in case two might grow in its place - if anyone knows whether or not there is any truth in this please let me know. I have to carry my drivers license with me everywhere because I am always asked for ID, which, at 33, I get an immense amount of pleasure from. But while I am smugly physically holding my own (save the grey hairs and the odd wrinkle, well I do have two kids after all) my mind seems to be speeding through the aging process making me feel old way beyond my years.

Is it age related deterioration though? Or is it just that as we get older we have so much more information we have to hold in our brains that there simply isn't enough capacity to retain it? 

It's kind of dangerous, socially speaking. I have lost count of the number of times when I have said to someone "oh yeah do you remember when we did that?" only to realise the minute it passes my lips that actually it happened with someone else, particularly embarrassing and potentially damaging when you are talking to a current boyfriend and it turns out it was a previous boyfriend you are talking about. 

Other little pointers keep coming at me, reminding me I'm not as young as I once was. Hangovers seems to last at least 2 days now (shockingly making me question whether or not getting drunk and forgetting an entire evening was worth it in the first place), and I keep finding myself using sentences like "I can't eat that, it doesn't agree with me." Something I always found highly irritating in my own mum, sorry Mum, I now feel your pain.

I've done a little bit of googling for the purpose of this post and discovered a study the Salthouse Cognitive Aging Lab in 2009, which found that the age at which our brain starts to deteriorate is 27. Twenty-seven! I hadn't even had kids then. But on the plus side, some studies have shown that women's brains actually get bigger after having kids (along with everything else that gets bigger I suppose that stands to reason).

There is surgery and botox for physical aging, but what for cognitive aging? It seems we must we rely on that game for the DS - Dr Something or others brain training (and no, the irony of not being able to remember the name of it is not lost on me) and Sudoku to keep our brains functioning at their optimum.

Maybe they will discover a "cure" for this as they have with so much else. In the meantime it is yet another inevitable thing we just have to learn to live with, like death and taxes.

Time for a bit of telly. Now where did I put that remote? Oh yeah, right there. In the freezer.

2 comments:

  1. I cant remember my own name most days!
    Who are you again????

    ReplyDelete
  2. Possibly THE most hilarious comment ever! Keep them coming Madam N xxx

    ReplyDelete