Are we Losing it?

Published by Laurie on Tagged Midlife, Anxiety

Memory Loss or Memory Overflow?

Do you feel like your becoming more forgetful as you age?  Does it cause you concern that somehow your “losing it”?  I say that at least once a day.  I’m at home, I go downstairs, look around and forget why I went downstairs, then I say to myself (out loud)”I’m losing it!”

Why is it that I can remember every word from the Partridge family song, “I Woke Up In Love This Morning”,but I can’t remember where my keys are?  Why would my mind hang on to useless information in surprising detail yet forget important things like when I need to pick my son up from work, or my dentist appt that I made a month ago?

Are we really losing it or are our brains just overflowing?  So much crap to remember, there’s only a finite amount of space between our ears.  It can only hold so much information.  Perhaps as we try to process more and more information, some stuff just gets discarded.  Falls right out the back.  But if that’s the case, why don’t I get rid of my Partridge Family song and keep my dentist appt.? That would make the most sense.
 
Maybe it’s because the words to the song are stored in the attic of my brain, while my dentist appt hasn’t even been put away yet.  It’s on the step to the attic, waiting to be stored or used. That’s a reasonable assumption.  But if I think of it that way, with all the stuff on my steps, it amazing that I can even get up to the attic to find that stupid song.  But somehow I do.

Maybe it’s because the words to the song made an impression on me and my brain doesn’t want to forget it.  (I admit, I always smile if I hear the song on the oldies station, yeah, that’s right it’s considered an oldie).  Or perhaps my brain wants to forget that I have a dentist appt.  But I don’t want to forget that I need to pick up my son.  I need that information.  So why do I forget it? 

If my brain can only hold a finite amount of information, why can the rocket scientists, the PHDs, the heart surgeons brains hold all that information.  I’m no rocket scientist.  I didn’t attend 10 years of post doctorate studies, cramming information into my brain.  I’m pretty much just holding the basics.  Is my brain smaller?  I don’t think so. 

I think that it depends on the type of information we need to process.  Dynamic information seems harder to hold on to.  Constantly changing demands on us, multiple schedules, recurring responsibilities that change with each week.  We leave our keys in a different spot on the counter, or a different room of the house, depending on what’s on our mind at the time. (like some stupid Partridge Family song).  But the words to songs never change. The facts we learn at school don’t change.  It’s the “life stuff” that clutters our minds.  The millions of small decisions that we need to make every day, that build up.  The more busy our lives become, the more mental notes we take.

It’s like having a working folder in your filing cabinet.  You have the never changing stuff filed in their specific folders.  Then you have your working folder that holds the ongoing items that need to be addressed.  It gets larger every day.  Sometimes it gets so big, you frantically leaf through the items in there, and just cant’ find what you need.  You have to leaf through it again, and again, then suddenly, there it is.  What you were looking for. And sometimes, you just never find it. 

So I guess you can say we are “losing it.”  Not because our brains are older, because our lives are older.  There’s more going on.  Let’s give ourselves a break. 

I hardly ever lost my keys when I was in my 20’s.  I didn’t have so much stuff crammed in my brain back then.  I didn’t have kids to worry about then, I didn’t have pets to worry about back then, I didn’t have to worry about my parents (they were living out of state at the time), I didn’t have concerns about retirement, about mortgages, about college funds,  about mowing the lawn, about credit card interest rates, about scheduling a mammogram, about car insurance for a teenage son…you get my drift.  Or, maybe it’s because I only had two rooms in that apartment.  I could always find my keys.

Stumble it!

August 8th, 2007