As I’ve gotten older, I’ve noticed my memory has become more selective. It’s like my mind knows there’s only so much it can hold at one time.
When I was young, there was seemingly no limit as to what I could cram in there. Information for a final exam would involve the injection of an enormous amount of quintessential yet quickly forgotten facts.
Now I choose, consciously and unconsciously, what goes in and stays in. The problem is, it doesn’t always stay in.
A few weeks ago, I forgot my username needed to log in to my computer at work. That made me think... about my mental state. My username had not changed for at least ten years. Yet the longer I tried to think of the simple word and number (it has my own name in it for goodness' sake!) I so easily type every morning, the harder it was to remember. Entering it slowly and intentionally came with excruciating difficulty. Eventually it came to me, but not before revealing a serious blip in my mind’s matrix.
We all have lapses in memory. (Right??) It's actually quite normal, because the brain doesn’t work as efficiently as any of us think or hope. This is why the “Find My” app on our phones is so critical. We have it installed on all our phones to locate not only lost phones but our many digital devices. It once took me twenty minutes of intense geolocating to figure out my AirPods had slipped behind our recliner’s cushion. But there are always keys...
“Where did I hide my keys before we went on vacation?” my wife asked me last week when we got back home. “That’s why I told you, remember?”
Obviously, I did not. This is the selective memory of which I speak. I remembered vaguely her going in to the basement as we were packing, saying something about hiding them in something... but what? Thankfully, mentioning the basement was enough to trigger her week-old memory to pinpoint their location in an old blanket (we have a rather sophisticated anti-theft system).
So should we worry about this? If it was just one of us, maybe. But the chances of both of us developing Alzheimer’s in our forties (nothing to joke about) is next to zero.
When you’re young, you don’t worry as much about memory lapses. You laugh when you find a month-old banana under your car seat (no idea why I put it there) or a package of week-old strawberries under the sink (I had meant to put them back in the freezer). Did I question my sanity in my 20s when I apparently had issues with misplacing food items? Of course not.
My memory has the same issues it always has. I’m still good at memorizing and relaying facts but I’ve always struggled with recalling and regurgitating longer strings of information. In Grade 12, I butchered a Shakespeare soliloquy in English class. In my first public speaking course, I could barely get through a one-minute speech without notes. To this day, I can’t sing along with popular songs because I can rarely get past the first five words – no matter how many times I’ve heard the song!
I also struggle with retelling what others have said because, for some reason, I have a dyslexic-like way of recalling conversations. This is embarrassing because it inhibits my story-telling abilities. Give me a pen and paper and I’ll at least make it sound reasonable, but to relay what someone else said orally is like playing a game of telephone where I’m the last person to announce someone’s garbled message.
Words can be difficult, but you’d think we could at least remember a face. Not so. Our memories fail us even when it comes to identifying people. As humans, we’re so bad at it that faulty eyewitness testimony is the leading cause of wrongful convictions in the U.S. Irrefutable DNA evidence has proven that people who were incorrectly identified by eyewitnesses – people serving life sentences in jail – were not actually the perpetrators of the crimes.
Our minds can mix up details across time and place and can even remember whole complex events that never happened at all. And once these errors in memory are made, they can be very hard to unmake. A memory is no less “memorable” just because it is wrong.
Remember that the next time you’re tempted to tell the story about the day you were born.
Even though, if I think long and hard enough, I can visualize it right now... As I've gotten older, I've also developed quite the imagination.
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