(Sara Rimer/ BU Today) — It took you half an hour to find your keys this morning. You forgot the name of a longtime colleague at a meeting yesterday. You got lost driving to a friend’s house last week—it’s true that you were more focused on NPR than the road, but you’ve made that drive countless times and you should be able to do it on autopilot.
Relax. All of these memory lapses are related to normal aging, says Andrew Budson, a Boston University School of Medicine professor of neurology, who specializes in memory disorders. They can happen to anyone.
Because we live in an age of multitasking and distracted attention, says Budson, we need to pay careful attention to form and retrieve memories. In his latest book, Seven Steps to Managing Your Memory—What’s Normal, What’s Not, and What to Do about It (Oxford University Press, 2017) — coauthored with Maureen K. O’Connor, a MED assistant professor of neurology — Budson writes that not paying sufficient attention is the main reason that healthy people get lost while driving to a familiar place or have trouble remembering names or where they put their keys.
Budson, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Center Education Core and associate chief of staff for education at the Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, wants to help people worry less about their memories—and understand more about what’s happening inside their brains and what they can do about it. His book is intended to help lay readers recognize signs of memory problems that are more than just part of normal aging. He describes the markers of mild cognitive impairment, dementia, Alzheimer’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases and emphasizes the importance of getting tested as early as possible if these markers are present. (…)