At a dinner for age-beat journalists in Las Vegas, I found myself sitting next to a gentleman from Toronto. He was there because he is the CEO at a media company engaged in family caregiving.

Making conversation with this new acquaintance, I started to tell him about meeting a notable philosopher from his country. This philosopher is an emeritus professor who happens to be teaching a course at Harvard during the current semester and I hope to interview him, while he is here.

I felt fairly confident that my newfound colleague would have heard of his distinguished fellow Canadian, and I wondered what his opinion of the philosopher’s work might be.

My only problem turned out to be serious ─ for the life of me, I could not remember the philosopher’s name. This fix surprised me because I had not only been thinking of him, but had recently run into him only a few weeks ago, one Sunday, on his way to church.

Call my forgetting a “senior moment,” if you insist. However, I hope you will not use this phrase in the current instance. For years I have been campaigning to apply it differently, in order to evoke all those times when my age peers experience new insights into things.

Those are the times when light bulbs go off in our heads and we see in brilliant perspective the answer to some problem. Or those instances when a piece of our own experience appears quite different, so as to lead to new understanding.

These inner events are what I like to call “senior moments.” Even though I have made precious few converts thus far, I am determined to bring people around to my outlook. For me, the power of our brain deserves to be highlighted, rather than its deficiencies.

By giving up the clichéd name for forgetting, we can strike a blow for freedom and dignity. And, just maybe, we may have found a way to enhance our powers of remembering.

Listen to what Connie Goldman says about memory lapses. This former NPR reporter, who has written half a dozen books, now takes pride at being 78 years of age, and has developed an approach for recovering forgotten things.

Speaking to a sympathetic audience of people in the field of aging, Goldman confesses that she is unable to remember a whole lot of things. The names of places and other proper names pose special challenges for her.

Also, she frequently walks into a room and wonders what she came there for. And she gets into her car without remembering things she had piled up by the door to take with her.

But this enterprising woman has figured out how to cope with forgetting words, at least. There, she has located the problem, not in the forgetting, but in being upset about it. The solution, she suggests, is learning how not to get disturbed.

“When the anxiety goes, the answer comes quickly,” she says. Her belief is that feelings of fear are the biggest obstacles to remembering. If you can attain inner peace of mind, then your chances become much better.

That does not mean you will capture the forgotten piece immediately, but she believes you heighten your possibilities for quicker retrieval. You may even have to wait until the next day for your answer; however, there’s nothing wrong with that kind of delay.

This approach she terms “the most important thing about the diminishing of my ability to remember.” This way of dealing with disability works for her as an appropriate response to what otherwise looms as one of later life’s most irksome problems.

Connie Goldman, I like to think, would be quick to endorse my campaign to change how the term “senior moments” is used. Without a doubt, she would credit her own discovery of the value of scuttling anxiety as itself a “senior moment.”

Back at the dinner table in Las Vegas, here is how I managed to dredge up the philosopher’s name. I employed a favorite device, namely a silent review, within my brain, of the letters of the alphabet.

In this instance, however, it did not work the first time around. If Connie Goldman’s thesis holds true, I was probably too anxious about the retrieval effort. I was not being patient enough with the workings of my brain.

It took a repeat of this mnemonic device to produce results. On my way through the second time, I stopped at the letter C and realized that Charles was the first name of the scholar.

After that success with the first name, getting his last name proved easy. Sharing the whole name with my new friend became simple and, yes, he did know of him.

Introducing Connie Goldman, the moderator had spoken of her in a lighthearted and affectionate manner, calling her “Mother Wisdom.” Though the advice she gives about forgetfulness may seem too simple to qualify as wisdom, on reflection I suspect it deserves that title.

Richard Griffin