Memory deteriorates with age. Is this the first sign of dementia? Psychophysiologist Vadim Rotenberg explains how memory works and why you should not get upset ahead of time.
Everyone knows that with age, the memory for the events that just happened weakens. Something happened just a few minutes ago, something has just been heard or read — and now it is impossible to remember. The person is surprised: «How could I forget so quickly?» And then anxiety begins: are these the first manifestations of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease?
But fast forgetting is not a consequence of the loss of information from memory, but the problem of insufficiently fast or insufficiently complete transfer of information from the so-called short-term memory to long-term memory. And that in and of itself can be completely normal.
Short-term memory is called so because, by its nature, it is not designed to preserve for a long time everything that we encounter in life. Objects and people constantly flash in front of us, events occur, we perceive a wide variety of signals from the outside world, we constantly have new impressions. Not all of them deserve to be remembered. So, when you cross the street, in a hurry, you pay attention to the approaching car, but, having crossed, you immediately forget about it.
Before you panic, ask yourself if what you forgot really means to you.
Only repeated repetitions allow us to keep in memory what is not immediately perceived as important for our present and future, and only more significant events are fixed in long-term memory.
Often people who complain about forgetting current events remember the past well, and from random impressions they often have only a vague trace, and it is this trace that can cause further experiences: “Something happened, but I can’t remember what.”
With age, the transition from short-term memory to long-term memory often worsens, and short-term memory capacity can also decrease, but before you panic, ask yourself if what you forgot is really that important to you.
A calm attitude towards forgetting what is not very important helps to keep the really important in memory.
I really liked how one famous poet calmly said in his interview that he almost immediately forgets almost everything he just read: it probably could not compete with his own imagination.
It must be remembered that the very worries about forgetting important things make it difficult to remember what is stored in memory. All people have encountered this phenomenon: you urgently need to remember what you know well, you must know — someone’s name, some term, an event.
You can’t remember right away, you start to worry, you tense up, you get angry — everything is useless. And then you stop your efforts, reconciled with the impossibility of remembering, switch to something, and suddenly the hopelessly forgotten itself pops up in your memory, when you have even forgotten what you were trying to remember.
This means that it was stored in long-term memory, but our fear of not remembering prevented us from remembering it.
This feeling generally blocks any activity, especially intellectual. And switching to another task helps to calm down, and then the supposedly forgotten is remembered by itself, because an unsuccessful attempt to remember something leaves an underlying trace.
A similar mechanism is triggered when it is difficult to fall asleep. Trying to sleep is the surest way to ward off sleep. After all, any effort is an effort, it is mobilization, it is tracking results: so many minutes have passed, but there is still no sleep … Expectation, tension, disappointment …
Trying to sleep in this state is the same as trying to sleep in fear that thieves will get into the apartment. Only in a state of relaxation, when you don’t think about the consequences of insomnia, you don’t keep track of time, can you fall asleep unnoticed by yourself, involuntarily, as the forgotten involuntarily pops up in your memory during distraction and relaxation.
The best thing is to distract yourself with some pleasant impressions from the past that arise as vivid images in which you can completely immerse yourself without demanding anything from yourself.
At the same time, the well-known method of mental counting up to 100 is less effective for falling asleep, although this monotonous calm activity and increasing numbers are like successive steps. Of course, you can fall asleep on the go — this sometimes happens with marching soldiers. But how long does it take to get there! The night may end…