Where Did I Put My Glasses?
February 27, 2026
It was all so amusing when it happened to other people. To old people. Such fun to say dryly, when one’s parent scrambled, frantic, to find their glasses, “They’re on your nose.”
But the other day, I was the one hunting for the glasses on my nose. Granted, I have always been absent-minded; I knew age would be easier for me because I already misplaced half my possessions and regularly missed my exit on the highway, lost in thought.
It is not easier. Because now I am not a flighty young woman, charming in her spaciness. (Or perhaps not so charming, but we tell ourselves fictions to live.) Now I have to scroll for a scarily long time to find my birth year in a dropdown menu. So the old (that adjective!) behaviors take on an ominous tone. No longer blond and ditzy, but gray and perhaps en route to dementia?
I checked.
Three things happen at once, at this age, it seems. First, the brain stops noticing constant sensations. Glasses on the nose are so familiar, their weight and slide do not register. Too much is more important. Besides, many constant sensations are less than pleasant, so we tune them out. I can now wear itchy wool sweaters, because I am no longer relentlessly aware of their texture. Humans are rather good at adapting, once we have lived long enough to know it is imperative.
Second, and sadder, our capacity for attention lessens, and our minds skitter from one distraction to the next, as though we have ADD and no Ritalin in sight. When our attention is divided in this way, we do not encode the putting on of the glasses, so their presence atop our nose never enters our memory in the first place.
Third, the present-tense working memory gets a little creaky and unreliable anyway. So many memories jammed into that little gray coil of brain, so many sandboxes and Proms and new jobs. The old stuff seems to have more weight. Everything that happened back then mattered so much; there was so much emotion, so much eagerness and angst and triumph, that the images stuck fast. This new stuff—glasses and grocery lists and applying for Medicare and which Part was that again?—it is less interesting. Less charged. Less memorable.
And when something happens that is new and exciting and memorable, we process the information a little more slowly. Asking for it to be repeated does not always signal hearing loss; sometimes we just need another minute to let, oh, the implications of AI agents surveilling national security, or the loss of all environmental protections, sink in.
So where are my glasses? I have no “live” sensory reminder of their presence on my nose; I have adapted it away. I paid no attention when I slid them onto my face, because, why would I? But I do not have enough extra bandwidth to remember even the boring stuff. All of this is natural, benign, and for most of us, inevitable. We panic because we do pay attention to the lapses, worried as we are about their implications, so their frequency seems alarming. My ditziness never scared me, yet it was probably more frequent.
Also, I did not need glasses in those reckless, carefree days. Nor did I bother with the coupons I now so often forget to bring to the grocery store, or the scarf and mittens because winter has dried wrinkles into crevices. In age, one needs more props.
Is there a solution? Furry glasses, perhaps, for an unusual texture. Or glasses that squeak a reply when you voice-activate a question about their whereabouts. Maybe I should s-l-o-w everything w-a-y d-o-w-n and ponder, carefully, where my glasses are most likely to be, rather than rushing off in a tizzy. And emotion is bound to help with the encoding: Oh my God, I am putting on my glasses! This could change everything!
Exploring the reasons we remember some experiences and not others, neuroscientists found that yes, we are more likely to remember emotional information—but why? The amygdala is clearly involved; when it is injured, emotion stops enhancing memory. But the amygdala does not act alone. It wakes the hippocampus, and stress hormones flow, and I do not, to be honest, understand the neuroscience enough even to summarize it. Perhaps I need more time to process the study.
In any event, I do not necessarily want to trigger stress hormones. I have plenty already. One bonus tidbit, though, is that divided attention—to which I am apparently more prone now—can block the emotion-enhanced memory making. So if something terrible happens, quick, distract me.
The rest of the time, though, I would rather not divide my attention. Multitasking is no longer fun. Partly because I am no longer adept, but also because I do not want to live in such a fragmented fashion. Which brings me to the place I have grown shy of, because it became such a fad: mindfulness.
Focusing attention on the present moment, at every present moment one after another, stops the division. What was a fierce competition for cognitive resources becomes a single, calm gaze. Events register and stick, at least long enough to get you out the door.
We must all become Buddhists.
