It's the little things that drive you crazy: Where did I leave those papers? What is that guy's name? Did I forget the bread again? What is her phone number? "In the grand scheme of things, they are minor lapses of memory. They may become more frequent and aggravating as you get older, but they are not necessarily a cause for concern," Dr. Wagster says. "It may take you longer to remember a name than when you were 25, but you'll probably retrieve it even if it takes a few hours."

To keep these petty memory problems from building up into major headaches, try some of the following memory techniques.

Pay attention. You often blame your memory when you can't remember, but many times, it is just as much the fault of your attention span. If you are not paying attention, you are not giving your memory a chance to absorb and store the information, Dr. Adams Price says. When you are introduced to someone, stop, listen, think about the name, and even repeat it out loud. Do the same when you make an appointment.

Make the unconscious consciousMake a mental note of all the little things you usually do without thinking, Dr. Scheibel says. For ex ample, if you can never remember where you left your car keys, every time you put them somewhere, stop and make a point of saying to yourself. I put my car keys on the tabletop. "It's a new way of thinking, where you have to reiterate each action that you perform," he says.

Locate with 'loci'. Keep your tomatoes in the bathroom? Sounds crazy, but imagery like that is the basis of an ancient Greek memory system called the loci method. In the loci method, you picture whatever you want to remember as being in a certain place. For instance, say you want to make a mental grocery list. Dr. Adams Price says to picture the milk on your couch, the bread on your CD player, the apples on the coffee table. Then as you need to remember the item, picture all the things in your living room. As you remember the place, like the couch, you will remember the milk.

Link words with images. Many people remember what they see better than what they hear. So think of what you need to remember as a visual image. For instance, you meet a man named Richard, says Sandra Monastero, a licensed psychologist at Friends Hospital in Philadelphia. In your mind, picture your new acquaintance as Richard the Lionhearted. You see him in your mind as a lion or dressed as a king. It sounds silly, but it works.

Sing your ABCs. If you can't remember someone's name, start reciting the alphabet in your head. "Oftentimes you can cue yourself to remember the name when you come upon the letter it starts with," Dr. Adams Price says.

Divide and conquer numbers. Cell phones, pager numbers, e mail addresses, security codes it seems the numbers you need to remember are infinite. All of those digits easily get mixed up in your brain matter. To make it easier for you, break them down in chunks, Monastero says. Perhaps your automatic teller machine code is 7241. Remember it as "seventy two, forty one" instead of "seven, two, four, one." Divide it into two numbers instead of four.