Tom Friedman - 1,000 Unforgettable Senior Moments: Of Which We Could Remember Only 246

by TOM... uh... FRIEDMAN

WORKMAN PUBLISHING NEW YORK

Copyright 2006 by Tom Friedman

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproducedmechanically, electronically, or by any other means, including photocopyingwithout written permission of the publisher. Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

eISBN: 9780761166122

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To Christy, Corey, and Jonathan

Wouldnt it be great if there were some way to alleviate the confusion and isolation of suffering senior moments? Wouldnt it be great if there were a book of classic senior moments experienced throughout history by some of the most illustrious men and women who ever lived, to remind you that not only is there life after senior moments, but also great art to be created, Nobel Prizes to be won, possibly even the reason for going into the next room to be remembered?

By sheer chance, youre holding such a book in your hands1,000 Unforgettable Senior Moments. Its an indispensable volume for all of you who are unable to conjure up either the first or last name of the person who just came up to you and said, Its so good to see you again! Its the book you will want to carry with you at all times so that you can open it at any page and see that Albert Einstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jimmy Carter, and countless others have experienced major mental lapses that make your own... well, hardly worth remembering.

If youre middle-aged, as I am, the first thing you may want to know about senior moments is: Are they really senior? Im often asked this, and although I cant recall what Ive said, I do have my notes, which suggest that the answer is yes, no, and maybe.

The most familiar type of forgetting is absentmindedness, in which information is never properly encoded in ones memory, if its encoded at all. Say youve misplaced your keys. When you laid them down, you werent giving their location your full attention, you were distracted, or, as scientists say, your attention was divided.

But these memory lapses can be junior moments as well as senior ones. After all, teenagers who are walking almanacs of useless information can lose one jacket after another, making their parents crazy. They can study all night for a test and in the morning forget everything they learned if the information isnt encoded in their memories.

But it is true that as we get older, we do seem to suffer senior moments more often. Certainly, were more conscious of our forgetfulness as we age, whereas kids tend to shrug it off. The stakes are higher for us. We have more things to do, more responsibilities.

But even thats not the whole story.

If we learn a new, less-than-earth-shaking piece of information (say, that the average Emperor penguin weighs 66 pounds and eats squid, fish, and krill), but we dont have a reason to use it soon after, imprinting it in our memory, it may never stick. Its not that there isnt enough room in our memory to fit everything in; its just that, as we grow older, we tend to remember the more important stuff and dont bother as much as we used to with information about Emperor penguins. Thats why I like to think of senior moments as evidence of having a more discriminating mind. (You might want to use this line yourself the next time your loved ones get exasperated with you.)

Forgetting even serves an important function for our species. What would our lives be like if we didnt forget anythingif we remembered every bad movie we ever sat through, every face we saw, every argument we had? How could we function if our attention couldnt be divided? Driving, eating, having sex, and following the plots of political thrillers, to name just a few things, would be impossible. What are a few intensely irritating memory lapses compared to the nightmare of remembering everything?

There are also enormous differences among individuals in their ability to remember, no matter what their age. A seventy year old can have a better memory than an eighteen year old. (When my grandmother was ninety-four, she could remember every student she taught in a Hungarian high school, while I couldnt remember where I parked my car. West 88th Street? Budapest?)

Thats the good news. (You may want to stop reading now and go directly to the contents of this book.) For those of you who are not only forgetful but masochistic, heres the bad news: Theres another type of forgettingcalled transiencethat does occur with the passage of time. A number of studies have shown that seniors in general have more difficulty remembering information theyve been asked to learn than college students do. Even when older people recall information as well as younger folk do, their memories fade faster. They have more trouble remembering the precise details of something, even when they can still recall the gist of it.

Theres another variant of forgetting that can be age related, as well. It occurs when something has been stored in your memory, but you cant retrieve it when you need to. For some, this is the most diabolical senior moment of all. Its the information thats on the tip of your tongue. Scientists, who are an unpoetic lot, call it blocking.

Blocking happens more often among older people than younger people, more often among forty year olds than twenty year olds, more often among seventy year olds than forty year olds. These senior moments really are senior. Proper names are easiest to block because often theyre not accompanied by context clues; theyre not very well integrated with related concepts, knowledge, and associations that might jog your memory. The odds of recalling the proper name Burns would be far greater, for instance, if it referred to an ER doctor, but that would be too easy, wouldnt it?

Now, there are a lot of books you can buy and courses you can take about how to add context clues to names and other bits of information, and there are sales people and politicians who seem born with the ability to remember names and places, just as there are absentminded people who seem destined to wander the earth incapable of remembering where theyre going and where theyve come from. But if youre not going to devote enough time, energy, and money to improving your memory significantly as you get older, I would recommend my approach, which is easier and cheaper. Just mumble, Its so nice to see you, when cornered by someone whose name you cant recall, and avoid at all costs playing Trivial Pursuit, chess, and poker.

Look at it this way: If you cant recall who your spouse is, you have a big problem and need professional help right away. Otherwise, you might as well laugh it off, which is what I try to do. When I can remember.

This book will definitely help you laugh it off. And heres the best part: You can read it over and over again and it will seem as fresh and funny as the day you bought it! Feel free to misplace it, so you can buy another copyand another, and another, over and over again!