...the whole exercise with drawing clock faces was just a trick to distract us from concentrating on memorizing the three words. The total elapsed time between hearing the three words and then having to repeat them was less than sixty seconds. During that time, whatever unconscious techniques we may have used to recall that information were NOT being employed. Both my wife and I realize we barely passed the test. That is scary.

Memory is an odd thing. We've noticed I have a hard time remembering names, but I am extremely good at recognizing faces. Mme Reclus and I often watch old movies on TV and I can recall an obscure actor that appeared in some other film; "Hey, that's the guy that played Queequeg in 'Moby Dick'."

She, on the other hand, has an uncanny ability to recognize voices, even though her hearing is in a bad way. For my part, I find myself making typos when I write that I should know perfectly well. For example, I often use 'hear' and 'here' interchangeably and confuse 'there', 'they're' and 'their', even though I know perfectly well which is which. You may have noticed I have given up even trying to remember whether "its" and "it's" is required (contraction vs possessive). I didn't use to have that problem.

These glitches are no big deal, I can live my life fine with them, but they do offer clues that they may be the result of more serious problems deeper in the machinery.

I also have noticed that when I read some of my older writings, from five or ten years ago, the quality was much better back then. Its not just a question of typos, I'm just not as good as I used to be. That's the scariest part of all.