Bullshit Baffles Brains
18 June 2007
Memories - like some corners of my mind - are blank … Yep, you guessed it, had a major memory-loss moment, and it was in public.
The one redeeming factor: Another woman, even younger than me, couldn’t find her car either!
There we were, two (relatively youthful) strangers, bonding outside the grocery store over the fact that we hadn’t a clue where we’d parked our cars.
Apparently forgetful incidences have nothing to do with my ageist theory, vis-à-vis early-onset Alzheimer’s, rather it’s due to selective short-term memory and the brain drain of multi-tasking. Here’s a first-hand example:
When I went into the grocery store I had my list of must-purchase items memorized. I’d managed to memorize it by repeating the list over and over in my head, even creating a little rhyming ditty to help me remember:
Fruit, veggie, egg & oat;
TP, butter, milk & soap;
Bread, cheese, olive & oil;
Chicken, chives, & London broil.
Having imprinted the ditty to brain, I couldn’t recall anything from short-term memory other than “fruit, veggie, egg & oat.”
Even once I’d finished the shopping (and in need of the ditty list no longer) the whereabouts of my car had been temporarily overridden in favor of “TP, butter, milk & soap.”
It didn’t help that as I exited the grocery store, my cell phone rang. With “bread, cheese, olive & oil” foremost in my mind, it was hard to carry on a conversation with Nikky, who’d phoned to make sure I hadn’t forgotten the chives he was planning to cook with the chicken for dinner.
Of course I’d remembered the ruddy chives! And the chicken! I couldn’t bloody well forget them at this point!
Rhyming ditty, shopping, cell phone interaction and boyfriend’s dinner menu - the data and details of multi-tasking clutter the brain such that one’s short-term memory is apt to temporarily malfunction.
However, after I’d cleared the clutter, i.e. told Nikky to chill about the dinner ingredients, told Self to shut up already apropos the dumb ditty, I made a pact with the other memory-loss girl in the car park to help find her car, if she’d do the same for me.
And together we did not make history when we discovered that two clear heads is better than one brain baffled by bullshit.
