This is widely understood to be a classic problem of aging. But as a neuroscientist, I know that the problem is not necessarily age-related.

But any distraction — a new thought, someone asking you a question, the telephone ringing — can disrupt short-term memory.

The relevant difference is not age but rather how we describe these events, the stories we tell ourselves about them. Twenty-year-olds don’t think, “Oh dear, this must be early-onset Alzheimer’s.” They think, “I’ve got a lot on my plate right now” or “I really need to get more than four hours of sleep.”

Many educators believe visualization is key to reading comprehension since it allows readers to organize information in their minds, make inferences, and remember content more effectively.

Aphantasia is not a monolithic condition. People who believe they have aphantasia, known as aphants, debate in online groups about whether it should be deemed a disability. Some who are just finding out about their condition in their 50s or 60s say they never felt hindered, while others believe they failed courses in school because of it.

Not being able to visualize means never picturing the faces of family or close friends and remembering images as abstract information.

“There is no sense more intimate, or more complex, which is why recalling your own personal smell memories can be so precise, vivid and even emotional. Your recollections might be one day, or several decades old, but that smell was once a part of you.”

Still, the moral was that bacteriology, that new 19th-century science, had figured out how one of the deadly microscopic bacteria did its damage, with a poison that could choke off children’s airways, and had invented an antidote, and that was miracle enough.

I see this as a story that should help us appreciate the unending ingenuity of the science that finds ways to turn on our complicated immune responses without making us suffer through a disease that once choked the life out of countless babies.

Words and phrases swam through my mind, but they didn’t add up to anything useful. Laurie switched to a restaurant scenario: “Do you have a table for four?” “I’d like two glasses of red wine.” I knew I had seen all the pieces in Duolingo’s sentences. But I was utterly unable to recall them and pull them together.

The app had made me a master of multiple-choice Italian. Given a bunch of words to choose from, I could correctly assemble impressive communiqués. But without a prompt, I was as speechless in even the most basic situations as any boorish American tourist.

learning English, in particular, can be a ticket out of poverty.

LONDON -- Prince William is encouraging everyone in Britain to follow the example of Queen Elizabeth II, his grandmother, in being inoculated against COVID-19 as authorities battle unsubstantiated fears about vaccine safety.

The medics told William some members of the public are reluctant to get any of the coronavirus vaccines authorized by regulators.

The disclosure was meant to end speculation about the matter and to boost confidence in the shots

Dr. Legates, a climate denialist installed last year by the Trump administration

Peter Gleick, a climate scientist and member of the National Academy of Sciences who noticed the posts and drew attention to them on Twitter, called them “ridiculous” and a ham-handed effort to grant a veneer of government respectability to junk science before President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. assumes office Jan. 20.

“To climate science itself these pose very little danger because they are pseudoscience, because they are ridiculous, and because nobody serious in the scientific community will pay any attention to them.”

It won’t erase the pain of last year, which was compounded for Mr. Johnson by the loss of his job, but the dance floor fantasy is soothing — something to look forward to.

but experts say that fantasizing, forward thinking and using one’s imagination are powerful tools for getting people through difficult times.

“Imagining the future — we call this skill prospection — and prospection is subserved by a set of brain circuits that juxtapose time and space and get you imagining things well and beyond the here and now,”