Re: Mixing words up/saying them wrong/bad memory anyone?
Word transposition is an entirely common phenomenon and is described frequently by persons experiencing anxiety or clinical depression, among the more common causative factors. It occurs as a result of passive attention and interference by rumanative thought patterns. What many persons who experience the phenomenon seldom realize is that they are often trying to simultaneously introspect while in discussion with someone, causing their focus to stray from its intended course. They talk almost in a reflexive pattern rather than proactive intent. They subsequently find the wrong word being posed at intervals, or in a sense briefly losing their place in the intended course of their conversation.
Complaints of poor memory are also due to passive interaction. While someone is introducing themselves, the affected person is already introspecting about how this person is perceiving them or alternatively how they are presenting themselves to the other person. Consequently, any attention to the verbal introduction was given insufficient attention to be incorporated into short-term memory. Remember that memory must be preceded by attention in all instances in order to be accurately recorded and retained. The part of the brain that first accepts information being attended to is Heschel's Gyrus and from there must take the journey along transcortical circuits and finally to the hippocampus before being relegated to short-term memory, possibly further to long-term storage.
Walking on a journey into a room to retreive something is vulnerable to the same effects. Many thoughts unwittingly cross the minds of persons with anxiety or clinical depression and by the time they've reached their destination, the original intent is lost because it was not held salient and a multitude of other worries or issues have become partially or transiently predominant during the trip. The brain must receive and maintain information in a certain manner in order for it to be properly managed.
The reason that anxiety and clinical depression are capable of inducing the phenomenon being described in your complaint is that they both induce distraction or interference with active learning. In fact, clinical depression is commonly referred to as pseudo-depression in the elderly because more than 50% of elderly persons experience some form of clinical depression and mistake its influence for poor memory or even Alzheimer's disease.
Understand also that age has absolutely nothing to do with failing memory. It is rather underlying causes such as advancing vascular insuffiency, clinical depression, or in the more rare cases, a neurodegenerative process. People in later mid-life and geriatric stages of life also being to unwittingly practice no rhyme or reason thinking habits. In other words, as aging commences so does the inverse need to abide by such a structured and scheduled lifestyle. In one's younger years, multi-tasking and pro-active thinking are replaced in later years by less stringent and stress-invoking tactics. In other words, a younger person can tell you where their car keys are at pretty much any given time because of the strategies being used, whereas a more elderly person might toss them aside in various locations because they have become deluged by a calamity of thoughts and worries about a multitude of issues, easily and oftentimes distracted. The strategies of aging produce more partial than complete cognitive strategies. Thus, gaps appear that are mistakingly blamed for some type of pathological cause.
In sum, there is nothing wrong with you in my opinion. You are merely experiencing common interference factors relative to sematic language function and memory processing. Nothing more.
Best regards,
Rutheford Rane, MD (ret.)
Last edited by RLR; 01-06-10 at 03:51.
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Best regards and Good Health