Are You Normal or Nuts?: Senile or Normal?

Senile or Normal?

All right, dear reader, the jig is up. You try to pass yourself off as a regular person, with normal behaviors, but we know better. The truth is you have a few truly bizarre habits. How do we know? Well, because we all have them. Weirdness itself is normal -- and makes us human. But while there's a big fat line between Jack the Ripper deviancy and Jack the Double Dipper quirkiness, it's not always so easy to tell the difference between that "cute" little thing you do and a behavior that may truly be harming you, or others. We asked some brave souls to give up their behavioral skeletons and ran them by the experts. Here's what we found: Question:
How come I can remember everything I did, said and wore in second grade, but I can't remember where I left the car keys this morning? Is this early senility? I'm only 40 years old!

Though some short-term memory loss is normal as we age, it usually doesn't signal early senility. And you probably don't actually remember everything you did, said and wore in second grade. What you remember is a handful of outfits and maybe a dozen key episodes. This was possibly an important year for you developmentally, and you crystallized these particular events into your long-term memory by recalling them many times and telling other people about them.

"These memories are accessible now because you really paid attention to those events when they occurred," says JoAnna Wood, a research psychologist in San Antonio who has done numerous behavioral studies for NASA. "But this morning's car keys? Not so much, I think. You were probably thinking about important things like work, what to have for dinner, and the bills you need to pay," so you spaced out on the keys. In long-term memory, we enshrine a few good moments from each passing year, and those that stick, stick well. In short-term memory, which uses a slightly different part of the brain, we try to keep track of the flurry of things in the immediate moment, and often those things slip. The solution is to take the car-key problem away from your short-term memory: Hang a hook by the door and put your keys there every single time you come in.