The diary of forgetfulness

He grabbed the gadget to take with him as he rode his car. Someone else was driving so as always, he started dialing his office number to give instructions to his staff before he got to the office, while his eyes seemed to reflect that his thoughts were scattered on a million other different things. Then he noticed that the phone was not performing as intended. Then he asked: “Why doesn’t this thing work?” Then his driver (who was also his wife) looked at him with that I-have-noticed-that-all-along look and pointed to his phone. It turned out that he was pressing buttons on their TV remote control. He and his wife looked at each other in some sort of comedy of errors and he said, “I wonder how many TV channels of our neighbors I had changed as I passed their houses?”

I myself drove through a STOP sign driving in US and when I realized I did the most bizarre thing: I backed up again to the line where the STOP sign was, stopped and then that was when I realized I was driving as if I were a monitor cursor that could just back up and correct mistakes. If I had done that now, that would have been lumped into what people refer to as “senior moments.” But I was only 25 when I did that.

In a study that has been accepted for publication later this year in the journal Clinical Neuropsychologist, but attracted my attention as it was also reported in the Guardian on July 29, researchers led by Maria Jonsdottir analyzed the reports of 189 healthy individuals to come up with a collective diary called A Diary Study of Action Slips in Healthy Individuals.

“Action slips” are more like mental lapses over matters that the scientists say occur usually within a “context of well-rehearsed or routine action sequences that we usually can perform pretty successfully without paying attention.” I guess this also would explain why we get quite alarmed when we have slips like these since we are supposed to perform them without having to bank on the equivalent of mental calisthenics.

It was quite reassuring that the weekly average for such slip-ups is about 6.4 a week and it was hilarious that one professor in the group admitted to committing 30. Last week, an article in the New York Times carried the recollection of a man, now in his 80s, when he was a little boy in his father’s shop when a man who had a funny hairdo and what seemed like a boat rope for a belt, came into their shop and asked for some “sundials.” The shopper turned out to be Albert Einstein and what he called “sundials” really referred to a pair of sandals that he wanted from the shop. Einstein turned out to rent a boat in that place in Long Island and named that boat “Tinef” which meant “worthless.” There was no shortage of villagers in the area who had a story to tell on how they had to rescue at one time or another, this absent-minded man with a funny hairdo who always capsized his boat, stranded it or lost control of it as it wandered out to sea. When Einstein had a slip-up, it was also Einsteinesque in proportion since it required some form of rescuing. This also illustrates that slip-ups were common even for Einstein although I do not think he worried about that at all.

The researchers speculated that “busy lifestyles, the popularity of e-mail and mobile phones, and high levels of stress” are those that have a bearing on our absent-mindedness. It seems that having to do many things all at once make us occasionally forget what is supposed to be “embedded” by routine in our minds. The researchers even added that the state of our memory is “affected by how tired you are, if you’re hung over or if you’ve got something going on in your life, like a new baby.”

But in case you are worried that the frequency of your slip-ups is making you think you are showing signs of dementia, the researchers found that “6.4” is the weekly average of slip-ups; and you can also probably blame your boss since the “scientific diaries” reported that most of the slip-ups happen on weekdays between noon and 8 p.m. However, if you want to blame age, gender and intelligence — think again because these had little influence on the slip-ups. If you still doubt if intelligence had to do with the slip-ups, remember Einstein and his remarkably aimless sailing adventures.

Lola Nora is one of my readers. She is 84 and she tells me that people say she has the memory of an elephant. She first sent me an e-mail through her grandchild but after that, we have been corresponding directly. She ever so mindfully composes her e-mails to me that would shame the diligence of any kid now with supposedly sterling memory. She once expressed to me that she worries whether she will get Alzheimer’s which is not a mere collection of “slip-ups” but a gradual receding of the recognizable self. I am no neurologist but at 84, if I could still remember and articulate as Lola Nora does, I’d worry less about Alzheimer’s than having enough minds in my company with whom to have good intelligent conversations.

Now, where were we?

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