“How could you not remember?” I asked my friend and hubby as I showed them the pictures from the opera Robert Devereux, about Queen Elizabeth’s favorite nobleman. Judge for yourself from the pictures below. The costumes were unforgettable - Queen Elizabeth I looking silly in her winged veil or ghostly on her deathbed. Yet they didn’t remember seeing the opera. I was flabbergasted. I can see forgetting something that was short and dull. But how could they forget a 2.5-hour opera with shocking images?
Memory can be a trickster. When we forget something we call it a brain freeze or a senior moment. I prefer brain freeze since senior moment equates bad memory with age. There are many reasons for forgetting, and most of them have nothing to do with age.
One cause of not remembering is brain clutter. (1) The memory is still in our brain, but we have too many things in our brains, and it’s hard to find things. It’s like trying to find a paper clip in your junk drawer. This happens more as we age because our brains are packed with decades of memories, like Fibber McGee’s closet.
We may not have recorded the memory in the first place. We may only give our full attention to things that we are interested in, so if we weren’t paying attention, we won’t remember it. My ears perk up when I hear my favorite song or my cat meowing, but I become deaf to TV commercials, the Kardashians, and lengthy explanations of anything.
Women suspect men only pay attention to topics such as sports, cars, or raunchy jokes. Ellen DeGeneres said the reason women talk so much is they have to say everything twice for their husbands to hear them. To get a man’s attention, maybe we should start every conversation with sports: “What about those Buccaneers? Speaking of the Buccaneers, we are going to dinner with Tom Brady on Saturday.” You’re really having dinner with Joe Jones, but at least hubby will remember dinner on Saturday.
Our brain also suppresses what it thinks is irrelevant so they don’t overflow like Fibber McGee’s closet. Suppressing can be positive. Studies have shown people good at suppressing can remember faces better than poor suppressors. Their brains suppress any characteristic that isn’t key to remembering the face. (2) However, suppression is not a flawless system. Studies have also shown that people are lousy at choosing images they think they will remember. (3) I figured those images of Queen Elizabeth I would have been memorable. Boy was I wrong.
Ever since Freud studied repressed memories, psychologists have studied why we forget. They’ve discovered our brains forget memories selectively when those memories interfere with new learning. It’s called active forgetting. When we park the car, we forget all the previous places we parked the car, remembering only the current place. (4) But that process can be faulty, too. There are several times when I’ve parked the car in a different place but I still look for it in the familiar place. That’s why parking lots have signs to indicate what row your car is in. Multi-level parking garages in large cities have ticket machines – you take a ticket that tells you what floor you’re on and you are supposed to write the space number on the ticket. The problem is, I forget where I put the ticket. Despite the row labeling and the tickets that tell us what floor our car is on, we still have times when we lose our car.
Another memory loss problem is the doorway effect. You walk into a room to do something and forget what it is the minute you step through the doorway. Even young people suffer from the doorway effect. Gabriel Radvansky PhD, Psychology, says your brain does this on purpose. Radvansky and his colleagues at the University of Notre Dame, claim that passing through a doorway and entering a different room creates a ‘mental block’ in the brain that resets your short-term memory to make room for a fresh start—like the black screen that movies flash between scenes. (5)
Researchers speculate in that prehistoric days the brain blanked short-term memory to protect us when entering a new environment. The brain wants us to pay attention to our new surroundings – you know, there might be a wooly mammoth lurking in the bedroom, so you might not need the slippers you went in there to get. Would backing through the doorway eliminate the doorway effect? One person thought open floor plans with no doorways help avoid this problem, but do we really want bathrooms without doorways?
Other studies show that people forget things when have multiple things on their mind. So if I enter the bathroom to get an aspirin, I realize I have to pee and forget the aspirin.
Then there’s the opposite of the doorway effect: the staircase mind. You want to respond to an insult or challenge in a witty way, but your witty response doesn’t come to you until it’s too late. You remember after the provocateur has left or in the middle of the night. Denis Diderot (1713-1784), a French philosopher in the Age of Enlightenment, described an event that occurred in his own life. He was left speechless by a remark and didn’t think of a reply until after he left the room and descended the staircase. Diderot called this phenomenon, l’esprit de l’escalier (spirit of the staircase) French for “spirit of the staircase,” The next time you can’t think of a quick retort, you can just respond ‘l’esprit de l’escalier to you too!’ If they don’t know French maybe they’ll be impressed. If they know French, they’ll think your nuts.
Sometimes forgetting things is a blessing. Hubby and I can rewatch TV shows and not get bored. That’s great during summer reruns and the writer’s strike. We are rewatching Harry’s Law, a 2011 series with Kathy Bates as a lawyer. It’s almost like watching it for the first time. We only remember glimpses about those episodes. We also rewatch game shows like Jeopardy and America Says, a game show where contestants try to guess fill-in-the-blank answers to questions. After a few weeks, we can rewatch the show and not remember all the fill-in-the-blanks.
You’ll probably forget all the ways we forget: active forgetting, the doorway effect, and staircase mind, but at least you can take comfort that it happens to so many people that scientists are studying it. And maybe you won’t feel bad about yourself when you forget what you entered the room for or where you parked your car. And remember the pluses of forgetting. You can rewatch Jeopardy or Robert Deveraux with the same enthusiasm as the first time you saw it.
References
Kelcie Walther, Lifetime of Knowledge Can Clutter Memories of Older Adults, Neuroscience News, February 11, 2022.
Brian Resnick, Why do we remember what we remember?, Vox.com, January 26, 2022.
Forming and Using New Memories, Thompson Higher education
Selective amnesia: How rats and humans are able to forget distracting memories, sciencedaily.com, November 7, 2018.
Charles B. Brenner, Jeffrey M. Zacks, Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget, Scientific American, December 13, 2011.
Clover Carroll, Staircase Mind and Related Mental States, crozetgazette.com, August 8, 2020
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