Thoughtlessness

Hmm, let's see, I was going to say something, what was it?

Oh, yeah, I remember now.

I'm starting to forget things.

Well, I'm not really starting to, I've always forgotten things, but it's getting worse and it's starting to annoy me. It gets more and more irritating to forget simple English words in conversation, or the names of friends I've known for decades, or famous public figures. Just the other day I forgot the atomic weight of osmium, I hate it when that happens.

It's a pain not being able to answer the question, "What the hell did I come into this room to do?" It can often be downright embarrassing, which is interesting because the word "embarrassing" contains the words bar, ass, and sing, in sequence, and its letters can be rearranged to spell "a germs brains" and "ass rim banger" among other things.

This increased rate of forgetting seems to happen to everyone eventually, and if it hasn't happened to you it's only a matter of time, take it from me. Surveys indicate that 75% of people over the age of 50 report that they have had some sort of memory related problem over the past year. The other 25% of course, can't remember. There is no memory research on people over the age of 70 because no one can remember the questions.

Certainly there are diseases that are responsible for this kind of thing, but in most people it's not a disease, it's harmless, age-related memory loss which even has a technical name: Benign Senescent Memory Loss, which means harmless, age-related memory loss, but sounds like you know what you're talking about.  

Everyone of every age thinks they are the only one who can't remember names. This is because everyone thinks it should happen instantly by magic. I learned the secret of remembering names in Calculus from Professor Carl Kerns. On the first day of class, Carl would make out a seating chart and take it home and memorize it. By the next class period he knew everyone by the position they were sitting in and would call on people by name. Eventually I assume he made the association between the names and the faces, but as long as you were in the right seat it didn't matter. I saw him do this in Stats one Summer in a class of 90 in a big lecture hall. The second day he was calling on people by name who were hiding in the back row and were so far away they were actually counted in the Canadian census. They would flip out, they had no idea how he was doing it, it seemed like some kind magic trick to them. It was pretty impressive, but his secret was simple: you just have to make the effort.

On the other hand, if you're a lazy bastard like me, all you have to do is not be embarrassed to keep asking people their name as many times as you need to until it sinks in. I mean, what's the point? After 50 you're going to forget it anyway. Even Carl is old now and probably has trouble remembering the names of his own children.

The most widely accepted explanation for this loss of function generally assumes that the cause is organic in nature, resulting from the decay, deterioration, disintegration, and eventual total devastation and destruction of the human brain caused by a lifetime of watching situation comedies and by all those words starting with the letter "d".

Naturally, I have my own opinion. I like to think of it like this:

When you're young, your memory is like a big storage room, with lots of shelves and drawers and cabinets and other places to put things. It's easy to store new information and easy to find what you're looking for because you can keep everything organized, and things are right at your fingertips.

By the time you're an adult, all those convenient units are full, and you have to start stacking things all over the place, mostly in separate columns on the floor. Gradually, the room fills up. When the stacks get too tall to be stable, they start to fall over and pretty soon no matter how hard you work at it, you wind up with one big pile. Eventually, the pile reaches the walls and from then on all you have is a big room filled with crap that you have to hope doesn't reach the ceiling, because if it does, you'll be completely out of room and have to start taking stuff out in order to put anything else in. If you're lucky, you won't live that long. In the meantime, you have to keep pushing everything back and spreading it out so you have more room at the top and in the end you just take new information, open the door as quickly as you can, throw it in, and slam the door before anything falls out.

Now, when you try to find something, you're facing a major undertaking. First of all, you have no doubt that it's in there, whatever it is. You also generally have a pretty good idea where it should be, and with a little luck you can get your hands on it without too much trouble. Sometimes you even get a bonus of running across something you were looking for earlier and couldn't find at the time.

But sometimes you don't get lucky and you can't locate the damn thing no matter how hard you try and you wind up facing two options. One is to settle for something that sort of resembles what you were looking for, some lame substitute that will do nothing but remind you you couldn't find what you really wanted, and the other is to give up altogether and resign yourself to the fact that even though it's in there, you're not going to find it this time, although there's a pretty good chance you're going to be able to go right to it once it's too late to make any difference.

You see, there's an assumption that forgetting means you're losing things, that you're missing pieces of knowledge, but that's not it at all. The problem is having too much knowledge!

This reminds me of a comment I heard a long time ago on a television program there is no need to mention when cerebronaut William F Buckley (who was the sixth William, coming between William E and William G) was asked if the reason he always appeared on camera sitting down was because he had no legs. He replied:

"I find it difficult to stand bearing the weight of all I know."

I always hoped that was a spontaneous response and not a line the writers gave him.

Either way it points to my problem: I know too much.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

copyright © 2002 Dan Manthos