A lot of people worry about their memories. You hear from people as they age about how they forgot what they ate for lunch earlier in the day or what the name was of the person they were introduced to at a business meeting in the mid-afternoon. Who cares?
We forget a lot of stuff. We forget way more than we remember or learn. We’d go crazy if we didn’t.
At the same time, I find it quite strange that certain words cause me a mental block and I can’t seem to retrieve them quickly and conveniently during a conversation. For example, “autism” is a word I seem to forget all the time.
I could be speaking with someone about Special Olympics and trying to remember a story to tell about an autistic kid on the court when I was refereeing basketball over 30 years ago. I’ll try and try to remember the word, and I’ll think of Down’s Syndrome or Asperger’s but I can’t get “autism” to register in my brain.
Then, after telling the story and having to modify details to cover my mental block, whammo, the word magically reappears in my mind. We all do this, of course. Something in our brains runs funny when we try to retrieve data and we can’t put into words an event or name that we KNOW we know.
The best tactic is to relax and forget about it (probably good advice for many events) and it will resurface. In fact, I make that point often when listening to people as they tell a story and get frustrated with not being able to remember a specific name or word. “Stop thinking about it. Just tell the story. It will come back to you.” And it does. Eventually.
What seems odd to me personally is the words I blank on repeatedly. As noted, “autism” is one of them.
“Valium is another.” A third is “Alfredo sauce.” Not sure what the correlation is between the three. They all have the letter “a” in there, but that’s about it.
Two nights ago I made an Alfredo dish for our younger daughter and her boyfriend. I described the dish to her with all the ingredients, but damned if I could come up with the name of the sauce. I can always remember “spaghetti” sauce, but not “Alfredo.” Maybe I’ll get better at this just by writing this column and imprinting the word into my memory.
“Valium” is not a word I use often, but when someone speaks of taking a drug to help them relax and they have a prescription, I go, “Is it ……? What the heck is the name of that drug that’s been around a long time that helps you decompress?” Again, for some reason I can’t verbalize it. I know it; I’ve heard it many times; but I can’t raise it with immediacy.
None of this is really a big deal. We all block on certain words. Memories work in strange ways. And there are easy methods to get your brain to more consistently retrieve data.
I guess I just really don’t care enough to focus on those words to ensure I can retrieve them repeatedly without hesitation. Maybe it just makes for a column or conversation subject, so my mind conveniently forgets. We’ll see how it goes next time.
We forget a lot of stuff. We forget way more than we remember or learn. We’d go crazy if we didn’t.
At the same time, I find it quite strange that certain words cause me a mental block and I can’t seem to retrieve them quickly and conveniently during a conversation. For example, “autism” is a word I seem to forget all the time.
I could be speaking with someone about Special Olympics and trying to remember a story to tell about an autistic kid on the court when I was refereeing basketball over 30 years ago. I’ll try and try to remember the word, and I’ll think of Down’s Syndrome or Asperger’s but I can’t get “autism” to register in my brain.
Then, after telling the story and having to modify details to cover my mental block, whammo, the word magically reappears in my mind. We all do this, of course. Something in our brains runs funny when we try to retrieve data and we can’t put into words an event or name that we KNOW we know.
The best tactic is to relax and forget about it (probably good advice for many events) and it will resurface. In fact, I make that point often when listening to people as they tell a story and get frustrated with not being able to remember a specific name or word. “Stop thinking about it. Just tell the story. It will come back to you.” And it does. Eventually.
What seems odd to me personally is the words I blank on repeatedly. As noted, “autism” is one of them.
“Valium is another.” A third is “Alfredo sauce.” Not sure what the correlation is between the three. They all have the letter “a” in there, but that’s about it.
Two nights ago I made an Alfredo dish for our younger daughter and her boyfriend. I described the dish to her with all the ingredients, but damned if I could come up with the name of the sauce. I can always remember “spaghetti” sauce, but not “Alfredo.” Maybe I’ll get better at this just by writing this column and imprinting the word into my memory.
“Valium” is not a word I use often, but when someone speaks of taking a drug to help them relax and they have a prescription, I go, “Is it ……? What the heck is the name of that drug that’s been around a long time that helps you decompress?” Again, for some reason I can’t verbalize it. I know it; I’ve heard it many times; but I can’t raise it with immediacy.
None of this is really a big deal. We all block on certain words. Memories work in strange ways. And there are easy methods to get your brain to more consistently retrieve data.
I guess I just really don’t care enough to focus on those words to ensure I can retrieve them repeatedly without hesitation. Maybe it just makes for a column or conversation subject, so my mind conveniently forgets. We’ll see how it goes next time.