Forgetting numbers and everything else!

OK this is a bit of a weird one,

Been suffering with memory issues for months now, usual sort of thing forgetting names, faces, places etc but today was a bit different. I was in work on the phone when I looked up an internal phone number for them and I couldn’t read it, I forgot what the number 8 was! Seriously, I had to ask them to look the number up themselves!!

You can stop laughing now lol!

But seriously, has anyone else had this? I can see the funny side now but it really upset me earlier.

hi becksie

i’m notorius for forgetting stuff.

my family roll their eyes and tut!

think of it this way - when everyone is ageing and forgetting things, they will have the embarassment but we will be old hands at it!

carole x

Hi Becksie,

I don’t know if it even has anything to do with MS, as it first happened years ago, but occasionally - very occasionally - I look at my watch, and can’t understand it at all. It’s as if it was an alien device. I still know it’s a watch, and that I’m meant to be able to tell the time from it, but occasionally, I just stare at it, and it conveys no useful meaning.

It usually only lasts seconds or fractions of seconds before the spell is broken and I suddenly know how to read it again. I’ve never spent hours or a whole day unable to read my watch, but it’s very disconcerting when it happens, even for just a few seconds.

I’ve also occasionally been somewhere I knew well, but it was as if I didn’t know it, and I couldn’t find a commonly-used shortcut home. I’ve had to walk all the way round the long way. I went again a few days later, and found the shortcut exactly where it’s always been, and couldn’t understand how I’d got confused and couldn’t find it.

I do think this happens sometimes to otherwise healthy people, too. There’s even a name for it: it’s called “jamais vu” (“never seen”) - the sensation that a familiar place is unknown. It’s the opposite of “déjà vu” (already seen) - the sense that an unknown place is familiar.

Both are probably a glitch to do with memory recording and retrieval. As it (so far) only happens to me very occasionally, and has never lasted long, I’ve not even reported it to anyone. I think it happens about twice a year - perhaps not even that. I think tiredness and preoccupation play a part with me. It’s more likely to happen if my mind has been wandering to other things - I suddenly find I can’t make sense of the here and now!

Tina

x

P.S. I was intrigued, and just Googled “jamais vu”.

Interestingly, Wiki says: “Jamais vu is most commonly experienced when a person momentarily does not recognise a word or, less commonly, a person or place, that she or he knows.”

I guess for word/person/place, you could also substitute: number.

It goes on to say that whilst it can be associated with aphasia (a language disorder usually caused by brain damage), it can also be induced in healthy volunteers by fatigue. 68% of volunteers asked to repeatedly write out the word “door” at high speed reported strange symptoms, such as beginning to doubt that “door” was a real word!

Tina

x

everything previously said rings so many bells. i’ve only been dx for 5 months (yesterday in fact) and have experienced a greater concentration of these symptoms since dx, but recognise some of the others from years ago… mad eh?