Working in Movement

You don’t necessarily have to be a senior to have “senior moments” — those times that you forget where you left your keys or blank on the name of a relatively new acquaintance. But, of course, the older you get, the more troubling it becomes.

New research from Stanford University might put your mind at ease, at least a little bit. In fact, the study even boldly implies that not only are things not so bad, they’re actually working the way they should:

The findings should also reduce some of the anxiety surrounding “senior moments,” researchers say. Some names, numbers and details are hard to retrieve not because memory is faltering, but because it is functioning just as it should.

Here’s what seems to be happening: existing memories might be getting in the way of the new ones. And the more successful you are at blocking these distracting memories, the better your recall of new stuff is likely to become.

Actually, the research focused more on finding marked decreased activity in the anterior cingulated cortex of those who were able to suppress distracting memories when trying to remember pairs of words they were asked to remember.

So forgetting a password might not be so bad after all:

People blank on new passwords so often because of the distracting presence of old or other current passwords. The better the brain can block those distracting digits, the easier it can bring to mind the new ones, (senior author) Dr. Wagner said.

I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to recall this article in the future. While reading it, I remembered a technique that Moshe Feldenkrais talked about on one of his taped lectures. The idea was to remember something, try to forget it. Probably you’ll fail, and thus will remember the thing. After all, you can’t forget and remember at the same time.

Distracting thought, eh?