We are all aware of what we call “senior moments”- where we can’t recall the names of people we have known in the past -only to recall the name at a later date – usually before the end of the discussion. Sometimes remembering may take longer, either several hours or after a night’s sleep.
There is another more frustrating type of amnesia where the clinical feature is a failure to recall or include a constructive idea or thesis, which would offer an excellent solution to the problem under discussion. To the scientist, this is called the “eureka moment”. That is why they say that scientists make their greatest contributions to research in the earlier years of their research career.