Huh?

I'm 42 and it's already happening. The other day I kept talking to the wife about how the bus driver wouldn't use the HOA lane and why wouldn't he use the HOA lane because it's for carpools and buses! Everybody knows that's what the HOA lane is for.

"Did you mean HOV lane, dear?"

Yeah, what was I saying?

"HOA."

Oh, well crap. Anyhow, the guy won't use the HOA lane and...

I don't understand what submitter is getting at, but I am offended none the less.

\I am over 45 and my brian is just as sharp as it never was!!!

I'm 38 and its already happening. I have been forgetting all kinds of things until something reminds me of whatever it is. I forget important conversations, books I have read, etc.

Or, maybe it could be related to the stress of hitting middle(ish) age and still working at the same corporation job that you've been clinging to for the last 15 years or so that you'd like to move away from but cannot see how it would be feasible.

/stress does horrid things to you. Trust me.

I'm only 38 but, this is me everyday: "Did you see that movie? You know, the one with the guy who was married to the singer in the band that did the song by the guy that they made a movie about and was played by the guy in that show with the blonde chic with the big boobs? No not that one. The one with really really big boobs. Yeah that's the one. What were we talking about?"

That includes idiots and heavy drinkers.

I think I have the same amou.t of stuff up their, just different

Just drink more, works for me..... what are we talking about again?

The worst part isn't that you CANNOT remember things, it is just that it takes a while.

Need to remember the name of that actor in that thing during a dinner party? Too bad. Not in this minute.

However, at lunch tomorrow the name will suddenly and brilliantly enter your consciousness.

Yep. I find myself forgetting things all the time.

I right there, getting older sucks rocks.

I'm getting hard of hearing, actually it's more like I'm having difficulty filtering out the extraneous noise to hear what people are saying. I have to turn off the faucet to hear my wife or go into the same room with no open doorway between us.

I have to use what were reading glasses for everything up close now. I put them on to eat if I want my food in focus.

So now I can't hear, can't see and can't think?

/Where's the pasture?

Yep. I find myself forgetting things all the time.

.

Aren't most politicians over 45?

/just saying

Yep. I find myself forgetting things all the time

ashinmytomatoes: I'm 38 and its already happening. I have been forgetting all kinds of things until something reminds me of whatever it is. I forget important conversations, books I have read, etc.

This happened to me at 40. It was like a switch was flipped in my brain.
I could watch a movie & remember none of it the next day. All kinds of weird stuff happened. My eyesight went in the dumpster almost overnight as well.
I wasn't sure whether to chalk it up to decades of drug & alcohol abuse, falling down & hitting my head alot as a drunken teenager, early onset Alzheimers, old age or a combination thereof. Freaked me out so much my Dr. sent me to a Neurologist. Numerous brain scans later the results were inconclusive.
The upside of all this was that I was injected with radioactive goo for one of the scans. Didn't get any superpowers though. :(

I'm 17 years older than my wife and she has far more trouble with short-term memory than I do. What appear to be gaps in my memory, most often are my failure to watch TV or pay attention to pop culture for the last 25 years.

Yep, I find myself forgetting things all the time

I can't wait to drink tomorrow @ Snowblower

Abe Vigoda's Ghost, you made me laugh -O -L so loud that I got some disapproving looks from my coworkers

I'm 27 and I've been doing everything in this thread since I was 10. You might get more absent minded as you get older, but a lot of us just start out that way.

Draq: I'm 27 and I've been doing everything in this thread since I was 10. You might get more absent minded as you get older, but a lot of us just start out that way.

17 years in one thread is way too much. Go visit some other threads.

Can we focus on the important things here?

What scrabble game are they playing where the Y is worth 10 points? WTF!!! What is that, in British pounds? Metric?

I first noticed a decline in my faculties at about the same time as when I opened my Fark account. Hmmmm...

Draq: I'm 27 and I've been doing everything in this thread since I was 10. You might get more absent minded as you get older, but a lot of us just start out that way.

There's sort of hope for you yet. When I was a kid I had an awful memory and no real capacity for critical thinking. Goldfish would sigh, roll their eyes and have to remind me of what I was talking about, and moths circling and diving at a hot lightbulb at night no doubt looked down upon my decision-making ability. Must have been ADD or too much sugar or not enough corrective head-slapping. The only things I ever remembered well were my dreams, which were fairly vivid and often lucid and I could recall them in detail even decades later. The memory and attention issues cleared up about the time I got into college, and then my brain turned into a sponge, involuntarily and relentlessly soaking up anything and everything, at least until called upon for such information on a mid-term or final. I aced a lot of classes, though I never studied, just listened and watched. I didn't have to make notes for anything other than keywords and numerical data, and that only because I didn't want to transpose numbers inadvertently. I had classmates ask to borrow my notes and I didn't have anything to give them. Some people started hating me for my having the right answers, but it was entirely unintentional; I just had a piece of brain working overtime recording things.

The downside is that lasted about a decade and then there was a further decade of having that ability only with specialized information or trivia, and then everything started to go away. In big chunks. Mentally and physically (not that I was ever fit or capable), I just started having shiat go bad on me. Including my eyesight, which isn't functionally unusual in the workings of the eyes themselves for someone my age, but there's also spots showing up, like I've been staring at lightbulbs, which won't entirely go away. Eventually, it's become like looking through a dirty windshield. Worse than the restrictions of physical aging is the restriction of the interface to the world provided by that failing body and the resulting starvation of the mind as it ages. My memory has holes in it where I can remember things eventually but it takes more time to fish them out, and as all this has been happing concurrently, I have to assume there's a connection. Worst of all for me, I can't remember my dreams anymore without really making an effort to record them as I wake, and then I recall them mostly as re-read narratives rather than being able to summon the sensory data and images. I don't know if that's aging or just aging the way it happens in my specific bloodline, but it sucks.

When I was a kid, I used to think my dad was a dimwit because of his misconceptions and attitudes, but now I think maybe he also had the same sort of thing happen to him, making him dumber and less aware, and eventually leading to his making some bad decisions and giving up when challenged by misfortune. When you're young, it's easy to think that people die only when they give up on being alive, that they must choose to not stay alive because there's so much energy and will and rage in just being alive that you can't imagine that fading of its own accord and so it must be a choice to jump off the merry-go-round rather than just keep going forever. That life simply was and that if you weren't choosing to die in a heroic manner you were choosing to die in a cowardly one. Well, I used to think that way, anyway. Now I think the battery does run down, mostly because the charging system fails, and the death we get is the one we either jump at because we don't want to wait or a nasty, pathetic, sputtering, feeble one. Lately, I find myself not sympathizing with my father's choices so much as thinking that he wasn't really able to make better ones by that time. I'm soon to be 45. He was not 20 years older than I am now when he died. I'm thinking that I don't have that much time left, given where I'm at now, but worse would be that if I did live to his age, I'd be a senseless blob of stinky goo at the rate I've been going bad. If I were to live to be my grandfather's age when he died, I'd be an angry amoeba in a puddle of filth. It doesn't frighten me so much that I'm going down a similar genetic path but it does make me angry and bitter that I'm destined to not make it to the time when technology will exist to fix me. So far, though, not angry and bitter enough to re-fuel the old rage for life, probably because my mental function is already too impaired. The truth is, the merry-go-round falls apart and you have to plan ahead and work hard to keep it in good repair for 70 or 80 years. And who does that when they're young?

Sure, I know we're not riders on merry-go-rounds. We're really just waves in the ocean, not the water nor the wind that propels the waves but just the illusion of persistence and individuality, and as we move along through energy and matter, our waveforms alter and grow and adapt and become more and less complex until they eventually degrade back into entropic dissolution. And I know my waveform is breaking down pretty rapidly. But it was never really a good waveform to begin with. To address the question posed in another thread, if I could be brought back to my peak condition and kept there for 200 more years I'd still be pretty bad off, so I don't know that I'd want that, but if I could be set up to continually improve over those 200 years, that would be a decent existence.

I don't understand the poster's references. Guys in jackets, probably is doctors or scientists. But a lady with a big thing on her head? A shiny place where the guys where tall hats and don't have eyes? Huh?