Memory

Readers of my other blogs [see this example] may remember that I reached the grand old age of 65 last December.  Yet, sixty five? it’s not that old really; is it?

My dad is nearing his 90^th birthday, my mum her 88^th.  Given that bloodline, I can probably expect another twenty to twenty-five years; can’t I?

But life isn’t that simple is it?  Besides having to keep my head above water financially, I have to stay healthy and keep fit too.  All of these are things I strive to do and will continue to do for as long as I can.

However, some things are unavoidable.  Memory loss for example.  At what point do I worry that I am losing my memory?  As I have said before, I do jigsaws and play scrabble to keep my mind active, I read copiously and exercise my mind as much as possible.  But what if bits of my brain are collapsing, synapses losing their routes etc., without my knowledge and without my permission?

I have decided to log major memory failures in this blog, as a means of tracking any decline and as a way of helping future research, either my own or that of others.

That begins today!

I’ve always had a tendency to forget things and surely we all have that tendency:

For example, I may be in a group of people and be discussing something or other but the point I want to make will just not come to mind, yet it’s there at the tip of my tongue at other times – so if the group are trapped and cannot change the subject or move away, I can usually perform a series of links for one of them to come up with the answer (the point, the person) that I have failed to remember.  All the time this is going on, I can see the answer (the person, the film star, the thing, the song etc.) as an image in my mind but I simply cannot name it.  I’m not overly worried by that type of memory loss – I’ve had it for a long time.

I liken our human memory functions to the RAM and ROM memories on a computer. Some of it has to be instantly available (RAM); things like the day, the date, the cost of something, an appointment, what’s for tea, my wife’s name, how to breath etc. but other things such as the planned dates for a holiday, a restaurant you once visited, what you had for tea last week, perhaps something you said in passing yesterday, etc. are more like the deep memory ROM. It’s the ROM memory that we have issues with initially I think.

How do we recall these ROM-like memories and which are most likely to be easily recalled and which are harder? How do we select and save them?

Anyway, more on this later – I’ll finish for now and continue sometime in the future.

David. [25/06/17]

 

• Memory