The joy of forgetting: Why losing your memory isn't necessarily a bad thing

13 April 2012

Barely a day goes by without some contemporary of mine moaning to me: 'Oh, my memory's going! We're all getting Alzheimer's!' They drive me mad by talking about a film they've forgotten the title of.


'Oh, it was that film. You know the one, with the aeroplane in it. "British" something or was it "English"  -  with that actor Ralph  -  his surname starts with F, I think, and it's got one syllable. Oh, what's his name?'

Then they stop and, with a sheepish smile, say: 'Ah  -  a senior moment!' (or, as a more amusing friend calls it, a CRAFT moment  -  'Can't remember a ****ing thing.')

Precious: Virginia, here as a baby with her mother, treasures memories of her childhood

Precious: Virginia, here as a baby with her mother, treasures memories of her childhood

But I can't see the problem. At the age of 64, I'm aware that my memory, as I age, is changing  -  but not necessarily that it's deteriorating.

Apparently there are three stages to memory: acquisition, storage and retrieval. As we age, the capacity to carry out the processes starts to vary from person to person, with the one that worries most people after middle-age being retrieval.

Is it really such a big deal? Some people think so. Cathryn Jakobson, author of That Memory Book: How To Deal With Distractibility, Forgetfulness And Other Unnerving High Jinks Of The Middle-Aged Brain, suddenly found her 'mental calendar, once easily summoned, grew elusive, as did my sense of direction'.

She wrote: 'My life became billowy, amorphous, as if someone had removed the support poles from my tent.' She was 'no longer an AK-47', but more of a musket  -  'you've got to load it, tamp it, pack it down and then fire.'

So she embarked on a quest to improve her memory. Eschewing the dreary old mnemonics  -  why should she imagine, whenever she went to the shops, a dog being ridden by a pig holding a bag when she wanted to buy pet food, sausages and tea?  -  she ventured into the medical world.

She consulted neurologists, biologists, and made forays into the realms of meditation and anything else she could lay her hands on.

Were her anxiety levels too high and causing lack of memory? Was she eating properly? Fish-oils can improve memory. Had she had a head injury when young? Was it a hormonal problem? Could it be her thyroid? Too much alcohol? Would playing bridge help?

But in the end nothing particularly seemed to help, so she just had to come to terms with the situation.

And, indeed, unless you have serious memory problems  -  for instance not so much forgetting your car keys but forgetting how to drive  -  there is a lot to be said in my view for changing memory patterns.

They don't change, necessarily, for the worse. As I get older, it's true, I often can't remember whether I've taken a pill or not in the morning, and am frequently forgetting where on earth I parked my car (sometimes I think I should leave a trail of crumbs, like Hansel and Gretel did to retrace their steps in the wood).

But I find there are all kinds of perks to our new memory patterns. For a start, there's the joy of forgetting quite a lot of things.

I recently bought a book by Patrick Hamilton, called Craven House, and read it with enormous pleasure, only to find I'd had it on my bookshelves all along.

And from the note I'd made in the end, had clearly read and enjoyed it years ago. Then I know I once watched the Bette Davis movie, All About Eve, at least 30 years ago, when black-and-white movies were all the rage, on telly.

I remembered the odd scene but I couldn't remember the plot and the whole thing, on seeing it again (though it felt as if it were for the first time) gave me a huge thrill.

In fact, I'm happy to confess I've forgotten an enormous number of the ghastly men I ended up in bed with. And I've forgotten quite how depressed I used to be. I've even forgotten the Sixties  -  thank God.

I know it must be awful for men to forget facts, like whether Napoleon was exiled to Elba in 1814 or 1815 (men, because of their brain makeup, tend to remember more facts than women, hence the predominance of male, few number of women, memory-artists).

But who wants to be like those rare people who can remember everything and whose minds are like veritable junk-heaps? In extreme cases they can't even operate normal lives, their brains are just so busy remembering everything.

There's a wonderful passage in Conan Doyle's Study In Scarlet  -  quoted by Martha Weinman Lear in her excellent book Where Did I Leave My Glasses? The What, When And Why Of Normal Memory Loss  -  which tells of Holmes's amazement when told by Dr Watson that the earth revolves around the sun.

He had never known it and was determined, once he knew to forget the fact. 'You see,' he explained, 'you say that we go round the Sun  -  if we went round the Moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.'

Another plus of our memory systems as we grow older is that while we may lose capacity in our short-term memory, our long-term memory often seems, oddly, to improve.

These days, cracks seem to appear in the walls of my consciousness, revealing glimpses of the past as clear as if they were happening now.

I can feel intense emotions about these moments that I never, as far as I remember, felt at the time. I recently had a very odd moment in John Lewis. I was looking at the carpet for some reason, which was bottle-green, and something seemed to spring out of it straight into my heart.

I was reminded of a bottle-green coat I once had as a child, but it filled me with a mad and poignant mixture of comfort and nostalgia. I could remember the feel of its bristly surface, even the smell of it.

And last week I saw a leaf on a bush and for some inexplicable reason it reminded me of walking to school on a hot autumn day, holding my father's hand. The tears that sprang to my eyes were inexplicably pleasurable.

Or I will suddenly remember the smell of my grandmother's apple blossom scent  -  a moment of pure bliss, captured in a nano-second.

The thing that most of my friends hate most is that they forget names. But according to Martha Weinman Lear, we forget names simply because they don't mean anything.

And anyway, there's a simple solution. If we're stymied at a party when a friend whose name we've forgotten comes up to us when we're talking to someone else, we can easily just say (having primed your first friend to stick out her hand and say her name on meeting the other person): 'Do you two know each other?'

If you're too shy to say what you should really say, which is: 'I'm so sorry, but I've forgotten your name', you can always use my sly trick of saying, warmly: 'Oh, dear, I've forgotten your name  -  all I remember is that you're a nice person!'

And as for remembering tasks, I've made lists from the age of ten, so I feel no shame in making them now.

Perhaps I find this distinct change in what I remember  -  and what I have forgotten  -  so undisturbing because I never had much of a memory to lose.

When I was 14, I used to go into a room wondering what I'd come to get. No doubt, even at two I was staggering up the stairs to my bedroom and completely forgetting it was my teddy I was looking for.

My view is that it doesn't matter a jot now if I come into a room and can't remember what I'm there for. It'll come to me. So what if I can't remember the name of the actress who starred in that film  -  you know, the one about boiled rabbits? Who cares?

I don't want to trivialise memory loss, of course. There is a moment when it's worth seeking help.

When a friend said to me the other day that she was losing her memory and it was worrying her so much she'd made an appointment to see the  -  'what is that person called, you know, the one you go to when you're ill?'  -  I realised she had made absolutely the right decision.

But if you are of my generation and you find you are reaching for a word that simply will not be extracted from the back of your mind, I would recommend the 'sounds like' trick or the alphabet trick, in which you trawl down the alphabet thinking of each letter until the word springs to mind.

The other day I was having lunch with someone, and we were talking about making our own frames. I mentioned that at home I had a 'thing that you use to make a picture frame'.

She was baffled. 'I'll remember by the end of the meal,' I said, wisely putting the whole thing aside so that my slow retrieval system could get going. I did a quick trawl down the alphabet to give the system a boost.

Sure enough, in the middle of coffee, I suddenly found myself exclaiming: 'Mitre!' much to her  -  and my  -  surprise.

One reason we remember a bit less is, of course, because we don't concentrate as much as we used to because we're so busy.

It's difficult to remember to ring someone back when you said you would when you're bombarded with e-mails, iPods, answering the phone or perhaps preparing for a talk you have to give the following day.

But as long as our changing memories don't mean we can't lead normal lives, there's little to worry about. And frankly, who needs memory anyway? These days, there's always Wikipedia.

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