August 16, 2016 (Tuesday)
They say that the human brain performs better than any computer on any given day. It does things no computer will ever be able to do. Sometimes it seems to do its own thing.
I’m having another one of those days when I wake up with a song on my mind that keeps repeating over and over. This time it’s a Frankie Laine song from 1946-1947, “That’s My Desire.” The thing that’s different about this memory is that I can remember all the words (it is a short song).
The question I have today is, “Why do I remember something from 70 years ago when I cannot remember a phone number from the directory long enough to dial it?” In fact, I can remember our phone number from 1936, when I was five years old: “C-5131 (or was that ‘time service’).” That’s about 80 years ago. But recently I learned the name of a friend’s relative and by the time I got home and tried to write it down I had forgotten it.
I did a little research (read one article) about this and found that we all have something called, “reminiscence bump,” which causes us to have vivid memories of our years between the ages of 12 and 22. During that time, our hormones were working overtime, creating fireworks in our brains, particularly when we heard music that we liked. Research has shown that the brain produces endorphins, etc. that give us pleasure when we remember the songs we loved as teenagers.
Long-term memory serves me well as I preach, quoting poems and Bible verses that I learned years ago, but short-term memory is becoming a thing of the past for me. Almost every day I ask Dwight about a new problem with my computer and he nearly always begins his answer with, “We’ve talked about this..”
I have a theory called the “file cabinet” syndrome, which compares my mind to a file cabinet. When the cabinet is new, it has few files and it’s easy to find what I want. Later, all the drawers are filled with files and my search is harder. The same thing happens in the computer’s hard disk. The new computer is very fast, but gets slower as it fills up with new files. So, this is what’s happening in my brain. Or so I think. It’s loaded up with nearly 85 years of files. That’s the explanation. Or not.