Those 'senior moments' and the 'tip of the tongue' syndrome

Many people get anxious about having ‘senior moments.’ People refer to them jokingly when they find themselves temporarily forgetting the names of friends, the reason why they have gone into a room, or where they have put their spectacles.

Understandably, these episodes often trigger concern that they could be the early signs of dementia. It is far more likely that they are just part of the normal ageing process of the brain. Effectively, it is caused by parts of the brain going out of synch.

The tip of the tongue experience is a well known example of being out of synch. It occurs at any age, but is commoner the older one becomes.

I am sure that virtually everyone who reads this will have experienced it at some time or other. You know what you want to say, and you feel that if you could only just bring it back into consciousness then you could verbalise it. It is tantalisingly close, yet however hard you try, you cannot bring it to the front of your mind, or get it past the tip of your tongue. You give up, go off and do something totally unrelated, then bang, it drops into your mind in a Eureka moment.

Research from Harvard University a few years ago looked at this phenomenon. It involved doing brain scans on 55 adults aged 60 and over, and compared them with brain scans from 38 younger adults ages 35 and younger.

They used an imaging technique called PET to detect the presence of amyloid, a chemical typically associated with Alzheimer’s disease, to rule out those whose memory declines were disease-related.

They found that some brains become less coordinated with age, but in a manner that is normal rather than the pathological changes that occur in Alzheimer’s disease, where the brain shrinks and gets lots of amyloid plaques.

They also found that brain structures called ‘white matter tracks’, which carry information between different regions of the brain, were deteriorating only in the older group. This seems to relate to the senior moments and the tip of the tongue experience.

In other words, these are normal and are unlikely to indicate the onset of dementia.