If you can't remember that you've just read this sentence, well, this might signal a problem.

If you can't remember where you left your car keys (or car), the name of the person you just met, or where you left your *@!#^& glasses, this probably is not a problem -- especially if you are one of the 78 million boomers for whom such memory loss is normal.

That's what authors Martha Weinman Lear and Sue Halpern say after both interviewed scientists and doctors for their recent books, Lear's Where Did I Leave My Glasses: The What, When, and Why of Normal Memory Loss (Wellness Central; $22.99; 247 pages) and Halpern's Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research (Harmony; $24; 272 pages). Both women speak Saturday at the Miami Book Fair International.

''Normal memory loss happens because brains start to shrink, blood flow starts to ebb, and chemical neurotransmitters start to do less of whatever it is that they do,'' Lear writes. This sort of memory loss is not related to Alzheimer's and is normal after age 50.

''It was happening to my own memory,'' Lear says on the phone from her New York apartment. 'It seemed to have crept up on me after a couple years. I was having trouble remembering names. I'd go into the kitchen and say, `What did I come in here for?' I'd forget where I left my keys or wallet or glasses -- and they'd be on my head. It was happening to my friends, too.''

Lear, who declined to reveal her age, or prefers to forget about it, worried she could be staring at looming Alzheimer's until a friend said, ''We can't all be getting Alzheimer's.'' She underwent a ''battery of tests'' at a memory clinic in New York and was told she was fine.

''It's a common thing I did not understand,'' she says. The symptoms were ''normal garden variety memory loss.'' Alzheimer's, on the other hand, ''is a very specific set of things that happen to the brain.'' (Fun fact: Mary Tyler Moore played Lear in a 1984 television movie based on Lear's book Heartsounds, which was about how Lear, and her late husband, Harold Alexander Lear, a Manhattan urologist, coped with his coronary disease. Moore wrote a cover blurb for Glasses. ''I'm one of the few writers I know who had a book made into a film or TV show who is happy with the result,'' Lear says.)

Memory loss tops the list of worries among boomers, both authors say.

'It's a very common joke, because you start hearing it all the time, `I must have early Alzheimer's' when you do something pretty dopey like lock the keys in the car or you can't remember where you parked your car at the airport, instead of saying, 'I wasn't paying much attention,' '' Halpern, 52, says from her Middlebury, Vt., home. ``Part of my goal was that I was curious -- was this a legitimate fear?''

Halpern spent five years researching Can't Remember What I Forgot. She met researchers in labs. She underwent PET and SPECT scans, and two MRIs. She ''gathered together stacks of academic papers with impossibly long, arcane titles'' and learned the language of neurology -- ''like going to grad school'' -- so she could converse with lab researchers on their level. This, from a woman who, when researching a prior book on Monarch butterflies, had a glider pilot whisk her into the air so she could feel what it was like to glide like a butterfly.

What Halpern found is that ``the number of people who are extremely smart who are devoting themselves to studying both diseases that take away memory, like Alzheimer's, and normal memory loss, is remarkable to me. They span all sorts of disciplines. They are not just neurologists or neurosurgeons but they are biochemists and physicists and epidemiologists. You name the science and you'll find people who are doing really good work. I have to believe that it is going to get us as far down the line as we can possibly get.''

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