Saturday, December 27, 2008

Old men forget more

For my title, I thought that Shakespeare’s remark, as it stood, was slightly off course. And I somehow managed to remember that it had already been taken, by Duff Cooper, no less. So I have added the word “more”. Perhaps I should have inserted “and women” to keep the feminists happy, or at least to treat them equally. I might also have ended with “and they ramble on”, which is just what I propose to do. My main point, however, is that everybody forgets. Old people just do it more, and more often. Also, while I presume that it was the long term that Shakespeare had in mind, the old can often remember that quite well. What they really forget is what they just heard, or did, or failed to hear or do, a few minutes ago.
Be that as it may, when I recently wrote a little essay on Robert Burns, as my personal celebration of his 250th birthday, I had the devil of a job remembering the titles or first lines of some of his poems and songs, which had once been very familiar to me. Now I fear that I will have similar troubles with anything else I write. This is a pity, for I think writing is a good pastime as you become less mobile, and better for the brain than reading, or watching television.
Remembering names can be a serious problem. I regularly forget the name of my destination when I get on the minibus to come home from our town centre. I say that some day I will forget my own name, and who I am, and I am not sure that this is just a joke. When I wake up in the morning I often don’t know where I am, not only in what house, but even in what country. (I should explain that I have lived in nine different ones, and I dream about them). Then I depend on visual clues, rather than trying to remember where I was when I went to bed the night before. And alcohol doesn’t come into the story.
In spite of having read How the Mind Works, by that fellow – what’s his name? – I have really no idea of how the brain deals with memory. When I was in charge of the Commonwealth Forestry Bureau, some thirty years ago, one of our recurring topics for coffee-break chatter was just this, the human memory. My colleague, Cliff Elbourne, said there were two theories. However, it was all only at a kind of folklore level; in those days the relevant neurological study of the brain had hardly begun.
One of the two theories was the “shelf” one, which said that if your memory is full and you add a new item at one end of the shelf, something will be pushed off the other end to make room for it. We agreed that this is an unlikely story, which doesn’t correspond to the easily observed facts. The other hypothesis was the opposite one, that the more you put in, the more efficient your memory becomes, and that its capacity is virtually limitless. That doesn’t seem quite right either, and in fact one of the popular phrases of the time, in our sort of business, was mnemonic overload, which did appear to relate to a real phenomenon, and which implies that there is indeed some limit on capacity. But it can be nothing like so simple as a linear movement, by which the most recent input ejects the oldest items in the library.
This business we were in was rather like a highly specialized kind of editing. We were trying to keep track of all the world’s serious scientific literature that had some relation to forestry and forest products. Collectively, we had to read everything we could get hold of from the adjacent library, in many languages – predominantly English, French, German and Russian. We depended to varying degrees on there being English summaries attached to the articles in Chinese, Finnish, Japanese, etc.
If possible, we had to recall any relevant earlier work on the topic of each paper, partly in order to report any such link, and partly to detect either plagiarism, or the author’s own multiple publication of the same material (which is surprisingly common). Finally, we had to produce abstracts, working to a particularly detailed set of “house rules” about the way they were written. All this, when I first began, was done without any computerized way of looking things up. The more you had to consult printed reference material the longer it took, until the process became hopelessly uneconomic. You don’t need much imagination to realize that a good memory was essential, and that a very good one was a great advantage to the abstractor – and in principle also to me, as the final editor. Nobody, and certainly not I, could emulate my predecessor, Percy Beak, famous in our little circle of fellow workers, who carried in his head a detailed memory of half a century’s worth of scientific and technical writing about forestry. At the other end of the scale, in the training of new staff, mnemonic overload was certainly a problem.
It was actually before this time, when I was in my 40s, and hardly to be called senile, that I began to notice what I thought was a strange phenomenon. Particular words were becoming especially hard to recall. The one that hit me first was parallax. I had come across the term, and the practical problem it denotes, when I acquired my first “real” camera, a twin lens reflex Rolleicord, when I was about 20. The small displacement between its viewing and taking lenses had to be allowed for if you didn’t want headless portraits.
Then, when I got into “relascope” studies, and was looking for instruments that could measure very small angles subtended at the observer’s eye, I found that the navigator’s instrument, the sextant, was ruled out by this same thing, parallax. The effect of it is altogether negligible when measuring the angle between sight lines to a distant horizon and to the sun or a star, but not for targets, such as tree stems, that are relatively close. I had found a small, almost pocket-sized sextant on the market, which should have had less parallax, but even that was no good. The surveyor’s answer, of course, is the theodolite, but I wanted something much simpler and more portable. So, between one thing and another, the term itself, parallax, had once been very familiar to me, but a few years after these experiences I noticed that I could never bring it back to mind when I wanted it in some other connection, which was maybe once every few months.
Then parallax was joined by another, quite unrelated word, obsidian. I knew of it very well as the rock, a natural glass, that is used in stone tools, as an alternative to flint, and later I was to come across it as the material used in making trinkets for sale to tourists in parts of Java – where I first learned that (unlike the T-model Ford) it comes in several colours, including white, as well as black. But then, for a long time I just couldn’t recall the word when I wanted it. I would be trying to say to my wife: “Let’s go and get a stock of those bangles and things, for Christmas presents, the next time we are in Giriwoyo. You know, the things they make from …”. I tried to find a mnemonic: Ob, for example, is the name of a Siberian river, but then came the usual trouble with mnemonics; I couldn’t remember that I had to think (a) of a river, (b) that it was in Siberia, and (c) that it was called the Ob. And even if I got that far, ob… didn’t necessarily produce …sidian.
One oddity is that both parallax and obsidian are now easy to recall (as I have done here) perhaps simply because I have come to think about them so much. But unfortunately their places in my list of blanks have been taken by a long and rapidly expanding number of other words. They are nearly all nouns, predominantly “proper” ones, and most particularly the names of places and people. I not only forget them, but also mix them up. It can be embarrassing. Just this morning I addressed my favourite niece by the name of one of the dogs.
If you try to laugh off such things as being due to senility (“premature senility” I would say when it first began) you always get the same response, from people of all ages, down to teenagers: “Oh, everybody does that”, they say, which may be true. If so, it would still be interesting. But how many people really do get this initial alarm bell effect, with striking individual words like parallax and obsidian? And of course, when senility does set in, and you do begin to forget just about everything, it isn’t true any more to say that “everybody does it”.
I have also had a few rather notable specimens of a different kind of memory failure. When my first wife died, I found that she had kept all the letters I had ever written to her. On looking through them I found a sequence covering several weeks, when I had been in Scotland, and she in Cyprus. I have been totally unable to recall the occasion for this reversal of a more usual pattern, and there was no clue in the letters. There must have been some quite ordinary explanation for our being where we were. Why had I blotted out the memory of it? This blackout may have been for some psychological reason rather than a simple neurological malfunction – not but what the two modes of explanation may be concerned with the same physiological phenomenon. Freudian, people say, but what might Freud have had to say about this one?
Then, on reaching four score years, I wrote my autobiography, and in doing so discovered, for example, that I had no memory of my three sons coming on school holiday visits to either Cameroon or Indonesia, until they reminded me that they had done so. I can’t think of any reason why my subconscious would want to forget my sons’ presence – which is not to say that Freud himself couldn’t have thought of one.
But do we really forget whatever our subconscious minds don’t want to remember? The idea is commonly accepted, and yet I don’t think it is generally true for me, at least. I have a large number of memories (that I never mention to anyone) which I would much rather forget, but can’t. Wouldn’t you expect the subconscious to cooperate? I hasten to add that they are mostly about foolish actions, not criminal or immoral ones.
Turning now to things that you don’t forget, but remember particularly well, one story says that the past is not recalled as a film sequence, but only as still pictures, frozen in time as “snapshots”. I think this may be another myth that isn’t generally true. I am sure, for instance, that my memories of our little donkey, Nicky, on an East African beach, are real continuous action shots. He used to attack me, rearing up and threatening me with his hooves, when I would grab his legs and throw him off. It wasn’t something you would easily forget, although it wasn’t really dangerous. With expert help from my wife, I did train him out of it, eventually.
I was once given an extraordinary window on someone else’s memory. It was highly memorable as an occasion, but I am not able now to recall the many details of what it was about. This first wife of mine, the one who had been my companion on the beach, died when she was only 50, and her mother, some 25 or 30 years her senior, survived her. The usual symptoms of senility were beginning to appear, and the process had no doubt been accelerated by the traumatic untimely death of her only child. One day the old lady launched into a long story about a ball she had been to, talking about it as something very recent – it could have taken place just the previous evening. This was in 1977, and there was internal evidence in her tale that the ball had actually been held in about 1920. She talked about it for half an hour or so, in great detail – who was there, what the other girls had been wearing, who had danced with whom, and all the usual chatter about such occasions. That really made me wonder about “how the mind works”. There must be some huge kind of store, like the Google one, only even more unimaginable.
One part of the recall mechanism, that I read about fairly recently, concerns the images that have once registered on the retina. Some people have the ability to learn long passages of the printed word by heart. I once knew a middle-aged lady, a specialist in English literature, who could spout a great many pages of the classic nineteenth century novels. I now think the probable explanation was that at some level of consciousness she could bring back what had once been projected onto her retina, and read it. What makes this extraordinary idea credible is that in a lesser way the ability is quite common, and when I first heard of it I recognized it as something that I do myself. Quite often, as I am going to sleep, my closed eyes see pages of text. I can move to different parts of the page, although not with total control. Unfortunately, when I try to read what it says, I can only pick out the occasional word, and can seldom make any sense of it. However, I can usually recognize from the typography that it is a book or a magazine that I had been reading that day. Something in the brain can store text, and presumably other retinal images, very much as a computer can, all ready for later viewing, or printing out. The really surprising part, I think, is that it can sometimes bring them back, as it appears to the conscious brain, to the eye.
There is at least one potentially risky trick that the truly senile memory plays. I think of it as confusing the intention with the action. You intend to turn off the gas, and forget that you haven’t actually done it. I got into this kind of trouble, but less dangerously, once or twice, when using my credit card to get cash from the machine, and forgetting to retrieve everything. The cure, which is working so far, is to go through an invariable routine, ending with a double check. Is my card, with the cash, and the payout slip, actually in my wallet? Next, this is me, putting the wallet into my left-hand trousers pocket. Then finally, I must look to see that I have left nothing lying around in the booth.
An old friend of mine suffered in his last few years from very severe short-term memory deficit of this kind. However, it was far beyond what most of us get; he remembered nothing. His solution was to compile minute-by-minute plans for his routine day, all written out in a compendious notebook, with a column for each day, in which he could tick off the items as soon as he had attended to them. The most obvious problem, of course, is that in ordinary life your activities don’t fall so simply into the same repeated pattern. But he was a remarkable man, heroic I think you could say, and he did manage to keep going, with his wife and other helpers never too far away. This case must have been caused by a total failure of some essential brain mechanism. The more ordinary cases, by comparison, are not such a complete failure, but just little breakdowns here and there.
My own mother’s mental processes went downhill quite rapidly in her final two or three years. The doctors said it was because a progressive blocking of the arteries was cutting off the blood supply to the brain. They had no cure to offer. It was a sad business, first the difficulty in remembering names, then the people the names belonged to. Then there came growing confusion as to where she was, or how to get to somewhere else, such as into another room, and finally forgetting how to do things, like getting dressed, or even eating and drinking. I don’t think that my own troubles have the same cause, and I certainly hope that they don’t have the same result, although my symptoms, especially the forgetting of names, are sometimes worryingly similar to her earlier ones. I tell myself that, like most octogenarians, I am getting steadily worse, but much more slowly than my mother did, which encourages me to believe that the cause is not the same.
I am fond of aphorisms, and one of my favourites is an old Scottish one: “Little wit in the heid gaes muckle work to the feet”. When I was young I heard it very often from an aged great-aunt, typically when she would get up and go to another room to get something, and come back without it, having forgotten what it was she went to get, or even that she had gone to get anything at all. This kind of short-term memory failure is, I think, by far the commonest mental symptom of advancing age. There’s not a lot you can do about it but, for example, if I have something in my hand that I know is going to have to be taken up or down stairs, I place it conspicuously on the first step where it won’t be forgotten. Writing things down, or elaborate routines, like my credit card one, can help. But the more sensible response is to realize that I have plenty of time on my hands to make an extra trip to get that glass of water, or whatever, and that the exercise will probably do me good, even if it is a bit tiresome.
There are some branches of learning that really demand a good memory. When I was a first-year forestry student we had a lot of contact with our medical counterparts, and they were much given to complaining about their anatomy classes. They said that almost the only requirement was that they should remember the names of every small protuberance of every bone, plus a large number of muscles, nerves, etc. But in fact most biological studies include taxonomy – the classification and naming of distinguishable groups of organisms. Then anyone who is into botany, for example, ends up with a huge number of names in his or her head. Even a poor botanist like me could at one time have put a name to the great majority of British wild flowers, as well as both native and introduced trees, in both Latin and English, with a few Scottish ones thrown in (like the “bluebell” to which the English give the strange name of “hare bell”). And eventually I must have known many hundreds of names in quite a variety of languages. Now they have nearly all evaporated, so that when asked for a name, I often have to say yes, I know that plant well, but I have completely forgotten what it’s called.
Modern teachers make much of the obvious truth, that memory is not the same thing as intelligence. They then draw the illogical conclusion that they should not require their pupils to learn anything by heart – except, presumably, when they have to learn their lines for a part in a play. Perhaps it was a little overdone in my time, when we had to learn many historical dates, and a lot of “locational geography”, like the names of a great number of rivers. Nowadays all this is referred to deprecatingly as “trivia”. One problem, certainly, is to know where to stop. At one time I could have named all the British counties, and all the sovereign states in the Americas, on the outline maps that were provided. Not all the states of the usa however – although curiously enough I can almost do this last exercise now (or could until recently) as a result of my interest in their history and current affairs. However, I can’t do what many Americans can, and name all 50 state capitals. There must be a happy medium. At one extreme, I think it displays a most deplorable ignorance when somebody says: “Indonesia – that’s in Bali, isn’t it?”. But I have to admit that I myself had never even heard of the mighty Mahakam River in Borneo – comparable to the Rhine in size, if not in geopolitical importance – until I went to live on its banks for a couple of years.
Then there is spelling, and spelling bees, highly specialized memory tests that are a national sport for American children, imitated in other countries, but I think out of fashion in Britain. When I was small, adults would regularly ask me if I could spell such and such a word – always chosen from the same very limited collection. Ipecacuanha was a great favourite, and Mississippi produced a little rhythmic mantra – “em-eye-double-ess-eye-double-ess-eye-double-pee-eye”. Another geographical one was Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar. Later, unfortunately, it was changed in international usage to the French Tananarive, but we have now reverted, thankfully, to what I suppose is the Malagasy form. Today, I have more trouble with Massachusetts – why do they double the t but not the second s?
Whatever the unthinking young tell you, it can by no means be said that a knowledge of correct spelling is useless. There are sound arguments for getting it right, and by far the greater part of the work needs human memory. Computers can help if you make mistakes, but you would be setting them a very large task indeed if you wanted them to discriminate between, say discrete and discreet, as you went along with your typing. The main logical problem, as we all know, is that spellcheckers will accept anything that is a word, even if it’s the wrong one – dairy, say, when you meant to type diary. I have to confess that I was never very good at spelling. I think it must say something about the mental processes, however, that although I very often can’t remember the right answer, I do seem to have a special store in my brain for the words (or perhaps rather, word types) that I’m not sure about. Each of them sets off the warning that I must check with the dictionary, whether on the computer or in that beguiling volume I keep on my desk, the New Oxford Dictionary of English. Is it wierd, or weird?
I have no doubt that I could find more to say about memory, if I looked into the subject on the Web, but this is meant to be just a personal account, so I’ll leave it at that, in the hope that at least one or two of the points I find intriguing will be of some interest to others.