My leaking bucket memory
There is a particularly annoying marketing theory which suggests that your business or organisation shouldn’t be like a leaking bucket. i.e. you don’t want to keep adding new customers to your bucket only to have the old ones ‘leaking’ out the bottom.
I fear that my mind is a leaking bucket. Over the past six months for example I’ve learnt two new tai chi forms and have been grappling with more advanced French grammar. This would all be fine and dandy and a great achievement if only my brain hadn’t forgotten practically everything that it learnt in the six months prior to that. I’ve disgraced myself in my French class by failing to remember really, really basic stuff and I can’t recall details of a tai chi form I’ve been doing for two years.
Most embarrassingly, I sat in our cold kitchen last night for ten minutes patiently waiting for Stuart Maconie on Radio 2 to back announce the lengthy Pink Floyd track he was playing. I knew the words, I knew where the changes came in, I knew I owned this record but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what it was called. It turned out to be the largely unforgettable ‘Echoes’ which takes up one full side of their album Meddle. How could I possibly forget the name of this track? It felt like penance for being overly familar with the Last Shadow Puppets CD track listing.
There are benefits to having a leaking bucket memory. I can, for example, re-watch the same film four times over and still be suprised by the ending. But this is not making up for my growing fear that for every new thing I learn something has to go. A kind of one-in, one-out policy.
I’d buy a book on how to improve my memory but I suspect that it would be a waste of money – I’d just forget it all in six months.
December 10th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
It’s like the Homer (Simpson) quote…
‘every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain.’
I ‘m the same – I did wing chun for 3 years (which seems to have som cross over with tai chi) and could never remember past the the first third of the first form – I caught a bit of a Kylie thing Monday night and even though hoppy skippy dance routines really aren’t my thing – how on earth do they remember 90 minutes worth – while singing too!!
Like you say it’s an asset for films, and I could do the box set loop, and start all over again after finishing – but not so good for books when you’ve forgotten the beginning, before you get to the end.
December 10th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
I don’t know whether having the same foilbles as Homer Simpson makes me feel any better…
Just looked up Wing Chun on wikipedia and it seems very vigorous! Apparently a correct Wing Chun stance is like ‘a piece of bamboo, firm but flexible, rooted but yielding.’ I love that stuff.
December 10th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
Rings a bell with me all that, particularly the films thing. Except in my case it applies to jokes, which means that when someone asks me have I heard the one about…? I answer no, but then duly fail to laugh at the punch line when I realise that I *have* in fact heard it after all. Guaranteed to kill a conversation stone dead.
December 11th, 2008 at 10:50 am
I’m ok on the jokes front. So far.
It’s amazing to think that only relatively recently, before video, DVDs and even movies on TV, if you didn’t see a film at the cinema, you probably wouldn’t see it at all. There were fewer opportunities to start watching something, then actually realise half way through you’d seen it before.
December 14th, 2008 at 3:06 pm
I totally understand where you’re coming from. I’ve learned things and then think about the fact that I can’t remember something I had learned earlier in the year though. It’s like it fades away after some point in time. Plus I often wonder if I’m pushing out some things I know to fit in new things. I’ve noticed all of this has gotten worse the older I get.
December 15th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
And the most depressing thing, Keith, is that we’re not even that old. What’s it going to be like when we’re 60? I may well not bother even trying to remember anything!
December 16th, 2008 at 6:30 pm
It’s all down to yer neural pathways, folks – how our brains lay down memory. The pathways that have been there the longest tend to be the most well-trodden, which is why old folk can remember their childhoods in startling detail, but haven’t a clue where they put their glasses half an hour ago. It’s a case of use it or lose it, I’m afraid. Get those irregular verbs working!