Saturday 11 June 2011

Recall furiously failing

Fallibility of memory, the curse of middle age, is upon me. A thought will occur to me, causing me to rise and walk into another room to get something, but by the time I reach my destination my mind is blank. Now what was it I came here to do? I’ll look vaguely around until my eye happens on some chore waiting to be done, which I assume is what I came to do. Leaving the room, I look back, with that nagging feeling of something forgotten. The moment I sit back down, it hits me, the memory of what I’d intended to collect. So I rise again, sometimes with the same result. On the bright side, it gets the chores done, and since there usually is a flight of stairs to traverse I get some exercise too.

When we say we can’t remember, we really mean we can’t recall. The memory is undoubtedly resting comfortably somewhere deep within our noodle, barring brain injury and neurological issues.

I have trouble with the passwords I need to remember to access systems at work. Often they are so fiendishly complex they defy mnemonics and can only be remembered as a movement or pattern across the keyboard. I’ll sit, fingers poised, mind blank, recall furiously failing, then a shiver will pass through me, leaving the desired memory in its wake. I imagine somewhere a gland has released a squirt of neurochemicals to reconfigure the neural pathways to allow the memory to rise to my conscious mind, the excess drugs flooding the hypothalamus causing me to shiver. If only I could do that on demand.

The flip-side of failing recall is the unprompted recollection, the memory that surges from nowhere. While my dad and I circumnavigated the lake at Roundhay Park this morning, he explained how the sudden recall of a childhood rhyme had gotten him thinking about memory:

Here’s the church,
And here’s the steeple,
Open the door,
And here’s the people

While he remembered the rhyme he couldn’t recall the hand movements, but by the time we spoke he had rectified that with a little help from google and youtube. What left him puzzled was the randomness of this memory surfacing. Like a prime number divisible only by one and itself, the memory had only been recalled this one time since it was formed many years ago.

How many memories do we have laying dormant, to be triggered to recollection just once?

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