The Vagaries Of Memory

[poliphilo]

Every night my mother takes a TV guide up to bed with her, only to find to her surprise there's one already there. I explain that she has two guides- one that comes with the Saturday paper and one that comes with the Sunday paper and she always keeps one of them upstairs. I then take the redundant one back to the living room.

But

The carer was asking her about the dinosaur on the Welsh dresser and she said, "Aileen and Anthony bought it in a charity shop to give to one of the grandchildren"- which is true in every detail.

Some things stick and other don't. I think she remembers about the dinosaur because it makes her chuckle.

Comments

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

We found this with himself's lovely old aunt. At the end you had to go back sixty years to find stuff she could remember.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

My mother isn't one for nostalgia. She has a lousy memory for the immediate past, a reasonably good memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago and the distant past isn't something she bothers with at all.

[veronica-milvus.livejournal.com]

I've never thought of you as Aileen and Anthony.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

My mother is probably the only one who does.

[butterscotch711.livejournal.com]

Even with good memories, we use our emotions and meaningful sensory experiences to make and recall memories (I think).

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

So something that has touched us in some way is going to be more memorable than something that is just information, right?

[butterscotch711.livejournal.com]

I think so, maybe even if you deal with the 'just information' much more often even with a good memory.

I'm teaching English as a second language. Learning another language is a constant exercise in getting information to stick in a memory which can't quite grip it...

At teaching workshops I constantly hear that anything we can do to leverage "affect" will help.

Maybe the TV guides are just kind of bureaucratic. Like workplace routines I have to re-teach myself after a vacation.

(Edit: Although, both my parents now work in different kinds of elderly care and what I've learnt from their stories is that memory problems are unpredictable and always unfolding differently.)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

This, I suppose, is an area where we've still got a great deal to learn.