Lost your car keys again? Concerned because you went into a room purposefully, only to realize you have no idea what you went in to get? It’s probably not Alzheimers or early stages of dementia, but lack of concentration.

This, according to Patricia Curtis in the March 2008 issue of Readers Digest. Curtis quotes Zaldy S. Tan, MD, director of the Memory Disorders Clinic at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who says, “Forgetting these types of things is a sign of how busy we are. When we’re not paying good attention, the memories we form aren’t very robust, and we have a problem retrieving the information later.”

As I described in a review of Dan Gilbert’s, Stumbling on Happiness , Gilbert explains it this way. We compress the huge amount of data that we perceive in a given experience into a few critical components: the sensory highlights and associated emotions. Later, as we recall the event, our mind brings up the highlights and emotions and fills in the rest. That’s right, we imagine what would have occurred to smooth out the few pieces of fact and form a complete story.

So our mental lapses may be nothing more than lack of focus and concentration. Whew!

Now where did I put that flash drive?