I had a chat with my doctor about this a few years ago, because as I approached 60 I was afraid I had early Alzheimer's symptoms.

He said that your brain is essentially a computer with a hard drive, and that hard drive has a finite amount of disk space. When you have important things to remember, they will displace the unimportant. It's probably not absolutely essential to your life that you remember what you had for breakfast yesterday, or even what you gave your sister for her birthday five years ago, but remembering, for example, how to do your assigned work without constant reference to manuals or other people is more important, so that's what you remember.

He also gave me a few questions to ask myself:

--Have you ever written a bad check (meaning, got the numbers screwed up, forgot to put enough in the checking account to cover the amount, put the check in the wrong envelope)?
--Have you ever started to drive somewhere and ended up in a whole other place, and don't know how or why you got there?
--Do you forget the names of people you see every day, either at work or at home?
--Do you regularly "lose" words?

If the answers to any are yes, you should be evaluated. Some other conditions such as clinical depression can mimic the symptoms of Alzheimer's, particularly the forgetfulness. No reason to assume the worst. Everyone forgets things. It's only human nature. As long as the reasons aren't rooted in something biologically unusual, there's no reason to panic over it.

Now what was I saying?...