Words Escape Me

I am speechless, I can’t think of anything appropriate to say at the moment.  I don’t think that this is related to Alzheimer’s or dementia, as I had a clear train of thought and then poof my words had vanished.  Has that ever happened to you?  Everything is flowing along you know exactly what you want to say and then brain fart, everything stops.  This temporary mental lapse or failure to reason correctly is so frustrating, as you are putting a string of words together that clearly convey your intent and that are coherent, until a processing error interrupts sensory data and then all is lost.  It is usually not totally catastrophic where you forget your name or what planet you are on, but this dysfunction of grey matter throws your brain for a loop.

It happens to everyone, usually when you are mid-sentence then something goes weird in your head and you might say, ‘It is on the tip of my tongue’, but alas all hope of ever figuring it out escapes you.  It may come back to you later, as you start to recall certain aspects of where you got mixed up, maybe you could just get the first letter of the word that you were striving for and then your thoughts come flooding back to you and you are relieved.  Brain fart is not a very technical term and neither is a dumb goof, so perhaps I should say that a person encountered a temporary breakdown in their lexical word retrieval or even refer to them as maladaptive brain activity changes.  Brains are rather complicated as you know and many people talk about difficult tasks and compare them to brain surgery or rocket science.  Your brain has that special organ called the hippocampus which is associated mainly with memory, in particular with long-term memory and whenever you try to remember something, your brain calls on your memory network to work together to access encoded memories.

Years ago, I had so many different jobs and I went on a lot of job interviews, so I memorized my drivers’ license number, so I didn’t have to take out of my wallet and look it up, and although I moved away over ten years ago, I can still recall that number.  I am actually good with numbers and I can remember my phone number from when I was a kid, but because I rely on my smart phone to do all of that for me now, I actually don’t even know my house phone number or my cell number.  I am good with places and remembering where I put my things, but I am not so great at remembering people’s names.  I see their face and I can remember details about them, but their names are blank.

I have had my moments like in the shower I finished washing my hair and then brain fart and I grab the shampoo bottle again.  On occasion I have forgotten to zip my fly back up, but the thing I do most often is forget how to spell certain words.  Just the other day I spelled Satan as Satin, oops and even spell checker will not help with that.  These blunders or inexplicably stupid errors make me feel devastated.  I guess we have all head those dumb blond jokes and even though they make me laugh, they could be offensive to others, so I am going to skip all of that.  The adult brain consumes up to 20 percent of the energy in your entire body and every now and then it needs to take a break.

If you want to include a dumb blond joke as a comment, I am OK with that.