I've been worried about some aspects of my memory for some time. Twelve years ago I went to a job interview in Kendall Square, and when I was done I went to retrieve my car from the parking garage and could not find it. I was in the wrong garage, and they were also quite different -- one had three "aisles" per level instead of the usual two. But "wrong garage" didn't occur to me until I had spent half an hour or more scouring the one where I thought it was. I also thought I had short-term memory problems, like being far less able than I thought was normal to (say) be given a list of 10 words and then say them back, especially the version where they distract you with something else in the middle. I got a cognitive assessment and was assured everything was fine, though there was no test relevant to the "wrong garage" problem, I don't think.
What seems to happen more lately is to have a conversation with someone (this is on the web), and then forget two weeks later that it ever happened; often it never occurs to me to wonder if I've had the conversation before. I now try to adjust a bit by assuming I might have had just about any conversation earlier, and the web (at least the programs I use) remembers history, so I can check. But it does get in the way of even tentative friendships when I see someone's name come up and have no memory of whether I've talked with them before and if so what was said, and what it revealed about who they are.
You have heard of "test anxiety" or "performance anxiety" (of various kinds). We've all heard of word-finding difficulty, a symptom of aging. But what I experience sometimes is "word-retrieval anxiety". For instance, "What's the name of the kid in that family, the middle child? <oh no, I'm not going to be able to remember it.!..> And indeed, I can't remember it. I remember the name of the older brother and younger sister, just fine, even if it's the middle child who was my friend, because those aren't the ones I was trying to remember. My few simple attempts to find any discussion by people with this sort of problem on the web were not successful. I think it may be getting worse as I get older, but I'm not positive.
Since late high school almost everything I write has been composed at a keyboard. Along with getting a high typing speed (100wpm or more, which I still have), I also had good accuracy. I typed the words I meant to type, exactly right. This was a handy skill for a software engineer, where quite often the computer is intolerant of errors of a single character, and if you don't make them you don't waste time trying to find them or fixing them.
Then a decade or so ago errors started getting more common in my writing. I would put in the wrong homophone, I would reverse letters, or drop a letter. Lately these get more common, and with surprising frequency I just omit a word entirely. One source of evidence of this has been what the spellchecker finds -- when I run it in "batch mode" rather than interactively, it's easy to get an overall picture.
I still write some computer programs, and now I get the series of compiler errors indicating this exact problem -- I skipped a character here, put the wrong one there, etc. At least as of last year, I could solve most of the programming problems in "Advent of Code", which often require some pretty clever computer programming. Lately I wrote a program (a solver for "Waffle" is the most recent, I think) where I had to correct 15 or so typos, and after that was done the 200-line program worked perfectly the first time -- the logic was correct.
One sort of cognitive decline I had never considered in advance was losing my knowledge of spelling. I don't mean the general rules of spelling, but the exceptions that we learn that go with individual words. One example is "Cacophony". I was writing this in some document, and "cacaphony" is what came to mind. The spell-checker flagged it immediately, and whereas in the past after making such a rare mistake I would have instantly known the real answer was "cacophony", now I don't. I just look at the word and wonder how to spell it, then have to look it up -- entering the wrong spelling as a search term in Google will usually find the right one. "Guerrilla" -- Two r's or one? Two l's or one?
For Wordle I wrote a trivial little program that lets me enter a word and simply asks, "Is this in the Wordle dictionary of valid answers?" (While the program will reject many rare words immediately so you don't lose a guess, it will accept 10,000 or so words as guesses compared to 2,000 or so valid answers.) I figure use of this program is completely defensible and not cheating, because the list of valid Wordle answers is in no way systematic. For instance, plurals of common words are often omitted, such as "stars" and "roses". But in some cases I use it to ask, "Do I have the right spelling of this word, or not?"
My cognitive decline is highly selective. Along with the computer programs, I win at least 99% of my games of Wordle, Quordle, Octordle, and Waffle. And I think/hope people can read my posts here and find the text to be well-written and the ideas expressed well.
I was going to write about some other memory problems I have -- but I can't remember them, now.
Did I already write a blog post on this issue? Checking reveals that it wasn't recent if I did.
