Misplacing your keys or blanking on a name may feel alarming, but a neuroscience expert says these everyday lapses are often mistaken for early dementia when they’re really just signs of fatigue or stress.
Dr. Tommy Wood, a professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at the University of Washington, made the case at Strong New York, the city’s largest annual fitness and wellness festival, telling Fox News Digital that most memory slips have a far simpler explanation than disease.
“For most people, it’s just because you’re stressed or you’re tired and weren’t paying attention,” Wood said. “If you want to remember something … you need to actually be focused, be paying attention. You need to tell your brain it’s important to remember it.”
How Memory Actually Works
Wood broke memory formation down into three stages: encoding, when a memory is formed; consolidation, when it’s stored; and retrieval, when it’s accessed later.
When someone is stressed or sleep-deprived, the problem usually lies in retrieval — the memory is there, but the brain struggles to pull it up in the moment. Neurodegenerative disease, by contrast, often interferes at the very first step, so the memory is never properly encoded to begin with.
“They don’t even remember or notice that there’s something going on,” Wood said. “If you’re noticing something’s not quite right, that’s usually a good sign.”
What Dementia Actually Means
Dementia is clinically defined as a loss of cognitive function severe enough to interfere with a person’s ability to live independently. Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia together account for 70% to 90% of cases, and many patients show signs of both.
Research suggests at least half of all dementia cases can be prevented through lifestyle and health changes. Key risk factors include poor heart and metabolic health, along with untreated hearing and vision loss.
Wood pointed to concrete steps — such as getting hearing aids or cataract surgery — as ways to directly cut the risk of cognitive decline.
“If you expect decline, you won’t do the things that will prevent decline from happening. Believing that it’s possible means you’ll actually engage in these processes, and then through that, you can prevent a lot of this decline.”
Wood’s emphasis on reversible causes lines up with guidance from the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic, both of which note that several treatable medical conditions can produce symptoms that mimic early dementia or contribute to subjective cognitive decline.
Cleveland Clinic stresses that early intervention matters when people notice changes in “brain fog” or everyday executive function.
“How your brain functions on a day-to-day basis is kind of the output of everything your brain is dealing with. But if you start to notice something, there’s still time to make some changes if you need to.”
