Memory

Some of my friends have been worrying for years that their memory is slipping. Especially women with children - they aren’t able to remember the simplest things, like bringing cookies to school, even though they made the promise only yesterday.

My friends can attest to the fact that I myself can't remember events, conversations, even people. I had to meet some of my friends more than once, because I couldn’t remember meeting them the first time around. Now I simply let people know when I meet them: 'I’m sorry, but I might need to meet you again. I have bad face memory.'

While I'm not happy about this, I don’t worry about it at all. Contrary to my friends, I don't think this has anything to do with age. Besides, I think I have very good memory.

First of all: I believe remembering things is a talent. And like any talent there are different qualities to it, degrees, sizes, colors, shades. I know someone who is able to glance at a person for a second, then describe them in nauseating detail. But they might not be able to remember what that movie was called that they loved so much.

My memory talent lies elsewhere. In 6th grade two people exchanged phone numbers in my presence. I needed one of the numbers 4 years later. Need I say more?

I can quote books and movies, while I can’t remember the actors’ names.

Second: I believe our memory is similar to a hard drive. With years that hard drive gets full. Some of the older data is stored deeper in our brains, whilst new data gets bounced off as “unable to save, not enough space on disk”. Even more so for mothers: they have to remember their childrens’s “stuff” as well as their own.

If your hard drive is full, nothing new will get saved on it.

Third: When we try not to forget something – we keep reminding ourselves about it over and over lest we forget it, thus using our RAM & overloading our hard drive: 'don’t-forget-not-to-forget-to-not-forget-to-forget-not…' leaving very little "juice" for anything else.

As I said, “not remembering” doesn’t bother me. I put reminders on my phone – it alerts me when the tasks are due. I make “to do” lists for everything - that buys me a lot of time, and... hey, I meet same people again and again.

That's pretty exciting.