@Butrflynet,
This'll probably devolve to a separate thread and be a good one.
I don't follow all the ongoing papers on memory, but will conject that memory flails in some circumstances, certainly surgery, but including medications, and may come back. Roberta the Swift and BBB the Sharp may bound back, their physiologic challenges and personalities being different. They are decades apart in age. I'm often awed at how sharp many people I think of as old are (and how old that is grows in number as I/we age). Take Roger Angel writing in the New Yorker on baseball, in what I think of as in his nineties. Maybe not, but he is pretty much older. I think of Roberta as The Kid.
I, on the other hand, have forgotten some words at the moment decades ago, probably even in my twenties, but then I have a large vocabulary of recognition if not usage and probably distract myself with the search. Sometimes I nab the word, but maybe not right away, and when I do it is by having a sense of the starting letter. I talk in sets of swirls which reflect my mind, even without wine, and sometimes I lose track or tire, and that has been so for a long time. I'd just call me non linear. Harder to monitor loss..
However, I'm glad to be here and posting, re my fairly extreme alzheimer's heritage.
Not to butt into Roberta's thread: it's an interesting subject, go for it, Roberta.