EVER experienced not remembering where you left your eyeglasses only to discover they were hanging between your ears right before your eyes?
That’s what medicine calls short-term memory loss. Comes with age, or aging, so they say.
Has something to do with the brain — the center of memories, good and bad, happy and sad, new and old.
For a good number of those in the autumn of their lives, memory loss could be the beginning of Alzheimer’s, a condition that eventually leads to, says the US Centers for Disease Control, the “loss of the ability to carry on a conversation and respond to the environment.”
Those who watched US President Joe Biden fumble in his debate with Donald Trump last July will have an idea of how it affects a person’s daily life.
Alzheimer’s disease “involves brain parts that control thought, memory, and language.”
For most of us, though, there are memories we want to forget that remain etched in our minds, memories we want to remember that escape our minds.
But forgetting where you put your car keys now and then may not necessarily be awful or something to worry about.
Well, at least if we take seriously the latest study on memory published in the journal Cell Reports and reported in Science Daily.
It turns out that “naturally forgetting” something now and then may actually be healthy for the brain.
Scientists suggest that forgetting is a natural function of the brain that allows it to interact with the environment in a dynamic way.
They reason that forgetting is a form of learning and may be beneficial as “it can lead to more flexible behavior and better decision-making.”
Apparently, memories are stored in ensembles of neurons in the brain. To retrieve these memories, the neurons have to be reactivated by environmental cues. When the neurons can’t be reactivated, you forget. But the memories remain; they just can’t be accessed.
“It’s as if the memories are stored in a safe but you can’t remember the code to unlock it,” says the study’s lead author.
So the next time you fail to greet your spouse on her birthday or your anniversary, tell them you didn’t forget, you just left the key somewhere and can’t open your memory safe.
Now, what was it I was going to write about this week?
