Have you ever struggled to remember something?
Have you had that moment of frustration when you get up from your chair, take two steps to go get something and while your foot moves forward into the third step you realize you have completely and utterly forgotten what it was you were going to get?
Have you ever been in conversation with someone who is recalling an event and then they say, “Well, I don’t need to tell you that. You were there!” And you’re thinking, “Wait. I was there?” because you have absolutely zero recollection of it?
If you can say yes to any or all of those questions, you might just be a Master of the Fine Art of Forgetfulness. I recently accepted that while I may not have a Master’s degree yet, I’m well on my way because this is what happened to me just a few days ago…
“Increasing forgetfulness is a normal part of the ageing process…”
I am standing in the middle of my kitchen, phone in one hand; while my mother (on the other end of the line) listens to my frantic rambling about a misplaced cookie sheet and my son stands in the porch outright laughing at my bewilderment. I don’t find my lapses of memory as amusing as others seem to. I just turned fifty and forgetting things isn’t nearly as funny as it used to be (you know – when it wasn’t happening so often)!
“Seriously! Where did it go?” I ask.
“You’re just going to have to retrace your steps.” my mother offers, not knowing that I have already retraced my steps…twice, “Did you check the fridge?”
I slap my hand to my forehead and groan because yes, in fact, I had checked the fridge…twice.
“Storage is the […] process of retaining information in the brain, whether in the sensory memory, the short term memory or the more permanent long-term memory. Each of these different stages of human memory function as a sort of filter that helps to protect us from the flood of information that confronts us on a daily basis, avoiding an overload of information and helping to keep us sane.”
I didn’t feel sane. I felt like I had completely lost my mind!
I had been about to bake some apple turnovers for my husband to share with the crew at work on his night shift. I was in the middle of a conversation with my son about what kind of work pants would be best in his new job. While we chatted, I walked over to the cupboard, opened the door and pulled out my big cookie sheet (the only one I have big enough to bake all eight turnovers at one time). As I stood in the kitchen with the cookie sheet in my hand, I said, “Well come downstairs and look at the pants we got your Dad. They might be good ones for you and I can pick some up next time we go to Costco.”
And downstairs we went to look at the aforementioned pants.
*insert a short discussion about the merits of cotton versus polyester pants*
We walked back upstairs and I looked at the uncooked turnovers sitting on the counter.
“Where’s the cookie sheet?” I asked no one in particular because it wasn’t on the counter.
“I dunno,” my son said, “wherever you left it I guess.”
Yeah. I didn’t think that was very helpful either.
The phone rang and since it was my Mom I answered it and went in search of the cookie sheet.
“…contrary to the popular notion, memories are not stored in our brains like books on library shelves but must be actively reconstructed from elements scattered throughout various areas of the brain by the encoding process…”
I checked the kitchen, dining room, upstairs bathroom, office, living room, bedroom (where the pants conversation took place), and the downstairs bathroom. I went back upstairs and stood in the kitchen looking around, mentally going through the steps I had taken up to the point where I realized I had lost the cookie sheet. I turned around and checked the fridge because…well just because. You never know!
Sighing with frustration, I looked in all the rooms, even the ones I knew with absolute certainty I hadn’t gone into.
Still laughing, my son said goodbye and headed out the door for home. At the same time, my Mom (still on the phone with me) said, “Well let me know where you find it!” When she hung up she was laughing too.
I gave up on finding the cookie sheet which had clearly either been stolen by a stealthy burglar or sucked up by aliens also in need of an extra-large cookie sheet. The turnovers were baked – four at a time on my small sheet – and were ready just in time to send to work with My Sweet.
It was only after I closed the door behind him as he left for work that I stopped dead in my tracks with a blinding flash of remembrance.
“…the human brain has the capacity to store almost unlimited amounts of information indefinitely. Forgetting, therefore, is more likely to result from incorrectly or incompletely encoded memories, and/or problems with the recall/retrieval process.”
I opened the door of the upright freezer in the porch and there was the cookie sheet; covered with a layer of frosty frozen blueberries.
The truth is I had put those blueberries on my big cookie sheet into the freezer two days previously. Got that? Two days.
Which meant I couldn’t possibly have taken it out of the cupboard earlier. So how was it I could so vividly remember taking the cookie sheet out of the cupboard and holding it in my hand?
I remembered it because my mind had been several steps ahead of my body. I had actually opened the cupboard door to get the cookie sheet, but I hadn’t taken it out because it wasn’t actually there! Because I was rushing to get the baking done and because I was distracted mid-task by the conversation with my son, it was only in my mind that the next few steps happened.
And that my friends, is just one of the ways false memories are created. That’s a real thing (obviously because I spent a lot of time searching for a cookie sheet that was never missing) and it happens to…drum roll please…EVERYONE!
There are scads of reasons why we can’t always trust our memories, from the simplest of explanations like ageing to the tragedy of trauma. We ALL remember our experiences through our own filters. It’s one of the reasons why eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. It doesn’t mean we’re lying about what happened, not at all, but it also doesn’t mean that just because we remember something in technicolor detail that it actually happened that way.
It’s hard to accept our own fallibility. It’s hard to admit being wrong about something we are so sure we are right about.
We don’t need to beat ourselves (or anyone else) up about it. We make mistakes; remember things incorrectly. It’s part of being human and it’s something to consider when we are tempted to bring up something from our past (or someone else’s) to justify hurt feelings or to score points in an argument.
There’s an old saying that says, “The first to apologize is the bravest. The first to forgive is the strongest. The first to forget is the happiest.”
And remember, my friends, money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you a new cookie sheet!
*all quotes taken from the article entitled “Memory Storage” from September 27, 2019 on www.human-memory.net
I cannot tell you how comforting it was to read this!