JONATHAN BROCKLEBANK: My middle aged brain is going on the blink (2025)

The President of the United States is more than 20 years older than I am and he would like you to know that his grey matter is performing at optimum levels. Mine is sputtering.

Donald Trump takes the whole world into his confidence for he is not obliged to share this level of detail – but if you really wanna know, the cognitive examiner was astonished. He’d never seen such a high score.

Yes, a perfect 30 out of 30 was achieved by Mr Trump in a test which presents candidates with teasers designed to identify evidence of mental deterioration.

According to reports in America, examples of the kinds of tasks set include the following: Draw a clock. Describe the similarities between oranges and bananas. Name words beginning with F.

‘I like taking them because they’re not too tough for me to take,’ bragged the 78-year-old President in a rambling monologue which skipped from subject to subject like a TV when you channel-surf on the remote.

I am less lucky than the President. Or possibly more honest. In middle age, I’m identifying evidence of mental fuzziness almost daily.

My brain is offloading information at a rate which, for now, bemuses me, but one day may bring more sobering assessments.

It’s a comfort to know it’s not just me. It’s happening to my contemporaries too – even those a few years younger.

I’m almost certain, for example, that I am not the one who keeps heating coffee in the microwave and forgetting to take it out when it is piping hot. I am merely the one who finds it in there, stone cold, hours later and derives some romantic pleasure from the notion that the lady and I may be losing the plot together.

Colleagues of a similar age are also understanding. Of course they are. We’re all on the downslope.

‘Who’s that Scottish painter again?’ asked one of them the other day. ‘Peter somebody. He has Asperger’s …’

I have interviewed Peter Howson – sat face to face with him across a table. I’ve been to exhibitions of his work. One of his prints once hung on my bathroom wall. Yet his surname remained irretrievable.

Worse, a moment later I couldn’t remember the name of Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery. Um … big building, West End … urban myth has it that they built it back to front …’

So many middle-aged conversations are going this way. Our brains are like leaky cannisters, losing data from the bottom as more is poured in at the top.

‘Healthy body, healthy mind,’ I tell myself, and go out for a bike ride which takes me through Pollok Park and alongside a river whose name I once made a point of looking up.

But could I remember it on Saturday? Nope. This was ridiculous. A large area of Glasgow is named after it, but I couldn’t remember what it was called either.

Not until hours had passed did it come to me this area is called Cathcart, which immediately solved the riddle of the river’s name. It was obviously the river Cath.

Wrong, I now discover. It’s the river Cart.

I’ve lost count of the number of computers I’ve watched lose their cognitive function and drift off into interminable dwams denoted on screen by what Apple Mac users know as ‘the spinning beachball of death’.

It’s supposed to mean ‘I’m thinking’. If it’s still there a minute later, I think it means ‘I can’t remember what I was thinking’. After 10 minutes it means ‘I am old and tired and very confused. No more questions, please.’

Am I heading the same way? Is my processor seizing up? How normal is it to find yourself recalibrating sentences as you speak after suddenly realising that a key component of what you were going to say – a name, an adjective – has deserted the memory at the most inconvenient moment?

And how ironic the nature of the data the middle-aged memory chooses to remove. Not the stuff you’ll almost certainly never need again, like the names of one hit wonder bands from decades ago. I’ll tell you in a heartbeat who sang Turning Japanese in 1980 – that City Boy were, of course, the combo in the top 10 with 5.7.0.5. in 1978.

Though I haven’t heard it in 40 years, I could even recite a good chunk of the lyrics.

But the name of that building I drive past several times a week? Iconic Glasgow landmark and among the finest museums in the land? Bear with me. Spinning beachball moment.

It’s brain freezes like this which make me grateful I’m not in politics. How much more trouble might Joe Biden have been in last year if, for example, the Arlington National Cemetery, vanished from his recall? Imagine John Swinney forgetting the name of that Hebridean island whose lifeline ferry service is the latest to fail.

Journalism is more forgiving. What won’t come to you in the moment you can look up – of ask a colleague with as many miles on the clock as you and take cheer from all the brow furrowing, from the evidence that their memory is becoming a banger too.

And while it’s true that we may not be winning many fastest finger first quizzes (unless on the subject of last century pop) our veteran noodles still bring much else to the table: experience, wisdom, judgment, instinct. All worse things to lose, I’d suggest, than the name of a wonderful Scottish painter who can be Googled in seconds.

Nevertheless, this household is determined to keep two capable brains ticking over as smoothly as possible for as long as possible.

We do several puzzles a day and compare performances. Indeed, the Mail+ app allows puzzlers to measure their skills against all other readers doing the same brainteasers that day. How tickling for those with niggling worries about their cognitive function to find they are in the top five per cent.

We watch The 1% Club game show – more of an IQ test than a memory test, admittedly, but any port in a storm of cognitive doubts.

‘I’ve got it,’ says one voice (usually hers) about two seconds into the allotted 30 you have to answer. ‘Me too,’ says the other moments later.

We push on deeper into the show until there is a faller (usually me). But not on the day I couldn’t remember the name of the river Cart. No, on that day I said ‘I’ve got it’ on the 10, five and one per cent questions and gave my brain the rest of the night off.

I think we’d all rather enjoy seeing President Trump on a show such as this. The guy’s so smart, astounding medical examiners? I see a pinballing mind too complacent even to try to remain on topic.

I hear a world leader who’d sooner boast about his smarts than acknowledge that his score is the standard result for those not suffering from dementia.

He tells us Presidents Obama and Biden did not dare take the test. Does he dare publish the questions?

He’d be doing the world a favour. Worried minds like mine could use a lift.