Memory loss subject of free public lecture

Forgetfulness is a minor affliction that affects nearly everyone, making Professor Janet Leathem’s public lecture on the subject on Thursday a date to remember.

Professor Leathem, a neuropsychologist based at the School of Psychology on the Wellington campus, says memory loss can be a cause of stress and profound irritation.

“Worrying about forgetfulness is a common feature of everyday life,” she says. “It affects everyone and is likely to become more apparent with increasing age – often just at a time when people are busiest and when they need to be at their most efficient both at work and at home.”

She will address concerns about memory loss and attempt to answer the many questions people have about it – why it occurs, how memory changes over the years, and what represents normal versus atypical memory lapses.

Recent research evidence suggests factors that can delay the onset of memory difficulty and Professor Leathem will present a number of practical strategies for preventing and dealing with memory lapses.

While her talk will briefly mention extreme examples of memory loss such as Alzheimer’s disease, its main focus will be about forgetfulness as part of the normal aging process.

Professor Leathem has been working in the field of brain psychology for more than 25 years, but says some attitudes to forgetfulness were timeless. “In the olden days people of my age probably weren’t still working or multitasking as we do today. If you do catastrophise, you might think, I can’t do this job, I am past it.”

But when formally tested, she notes that many people, while no longer displaying the abilities they had when younger, are found to have no more problem than others in their age group, and typically when problems are identified, they are less significant than people think and can be worked around.

Professor Janet Leathem’s public lecture Everyone Forgets: Understanding and Managing Memory Lapses is at 6pm on September 2 in the Museum Building, Buckle St, Wellington.