The other day my friend asked me what I wrote about in my last blog. My mind went blank. What did I write about? It was only Thursday and I already forgot what I wrote about on Sunday. Sure I have brain farts – times when I forget something I should know. But this brain fart scared me. After all, it wasn’t a passing name or fact I forgot. It was something I’d worked on for days.
In my embarrassment, I excused myself by explaining I often worked on several articles at a time and just that morning I had dabbled with three different topics. But I was actually horrified. How could I forget that? Am I getting dementia?
After a minute, I remembered last week’s topic. But why didn’t I know it immediately?
At our age, we are horrified at the thought we might get dementia. Living in a senior community we face it frequently. We see friends and loved ones slip into an unknown world. It’s heartbreaking to sit next to someone you used to have lively conversations with and now they don’t remember you. You wish you could ‘have them back.’ You’re crushed that, in the beginning, they know they are slipping away and are depressed about it. With every lapse of your own memory, you wonder if it could be you.
We are reassured when we pass the little test the doctor gives us. Remember four words. What day is it (who cares)? Who is the president? Using this circle, draw 11 o’clock. I cheat and look at the clock on the wall.
Your general practitioner pronounces you ok, but you still wonder. Do those simple tests really diagnose dementia? At what stage? Don’t you have to have pronounced dementia to forget who’s president? I worry that the simple test doesn’t detect dementia early enough to take advantage of medication that slows the progression. I have a couple of friends whose spouses take these meds and they said they do make a difference.
Doctors reassure us just because we forget several things it doesn’t mean we have dementia. But forgetting is frustrating, especially when it’s something we know we should know, like our neighbor’s name, We scold ourselves for being so forgetful.
One reason we can’t recall things quickly is that seniors have accumulated too much stuff in our memory and we lack the ability to ignore irrelevant stuff. (1) It’s like rummaging through the attic to find the fancy wine cooler you use only once a year and you find your high school year book and get distracted. He says we need to downsize our memories.
Dr. Glen R. Finney, a fellow of the American Academy of Neurology, studied how brain clutter can interfere with memory recall. (2) He showed college students pictures of famous people and asked the student to name them. “The more people that the students knew with the same first name as the famous person, the slower they were to retrieve that name,” He said “This implies that the more you know, the longer it takes to find the specific information you are looking for…I like to think of it as the price we pay for accumulating wisdom over the years and decades that we live.” Finney suggests the way we remove clutter is to focus on using more useful information and not focusing on less useful things.
The thing is, I don’t know how to sift through my brain and throw out irrelevant stuff. Am I so out of touch with today’s world that I don’t realize that someone has invented a brain organizer? I don’t know where these memories are even if I found a memory I don’t know if I need that memory or not. If I throw that fact away, will I need it in the next trivia game?
My brain has thrown out some memories it deemed irrelevant like the Latin names of the house plants I nurtured in my twenties. Now I’m lucky if I remember the difference between a philodendron and a weed. Last year when I decided to crochet some more Christmas ornaments like I had made when I was 40, I couldn’t figure out the instructions. So my brain has done a good job of dumping some old information. I guess while it was dumping those memories, it accidentally dumped out my email password.
Both Amer and Finney say that clutter isn’t necessarily bad. Evidence suggests that older adults have enhanced creativity because they have a wider source of knowledge to draw from. (3) They further hypothesize that older adults may be well served by their prior knowledge when it comes to decision-making, where they can pull on their accumulated wisdom.
So I might not be able to pull out the right fact when I want it, but now I’ll try not to stress when I forget something because some other time my brain clutter may help me make a better decision.
Epilogue
If you are concerned that your memory problems might be serious, it’s best to see a specialist. I have some friends who get annual checkups with a neurologist who specializes in dementia. These neurologists can track neurological changes that might indicate dementia and provide treatments to retard dementia. (4)
Dementia is a serious topic. It’s heart-wrenching to see loved ones and their spouses suffer that awful fate. Despite the many resources to help the patient and the caregiver, it still creates havoc for everyone involved. It saddens us all that people have to suffer like that. The best we can do is support our friends and loved ones by being there and not abandoning them at this terrible time.
References
Kelcie Walther, Lifetime of Knowledge Can Clutter Memories of Older Adults, Neuroscience News, February 11, 2022
Julia Reis, Brain ‘Clutter’ – What it is and how it can impact you as you age, Healthline.com, February 15, 2022
Walther, Lifetime of Knowledge
UCI Health, When to Worry about memory loss, April 9, 2019.
Extra references
Terry Fulmer, I Forgot, Maybe That’s OK, WebMD.com, April 13, 2022
Kendra Cherry, Reasons why people forget, Verywellmind.com , April 10 2021
Melissa Lee, What Do Dementia Patients Think About?, aPlaceforMom.com, May 31, 2022.
Dr. Bill Beckwith, Memory Minute If I don’t Play Sudoku will I get Alzheimers? Naples Daily News, Oct 14, 2009
Well, it's a big club we're in - Elders Anonymous. We all seem to have the same issue and clutter is a good way think about it. I often told my husband who had Alzheimer's: "That drawer in your brain isn't open right now. It will be unlocked later." And, sure enough, he could remember what he wanted a little later. Lynn
Ogre at article and description ad in! As usual.