One has noted a strange phenomenon of late,one is not bragging when one states at one time one was regarded a sort of walking google, one's head glowed with the amount of obscure facts and arcane snippets contained therein,people in Pubs would phone the Towers to have arguments/bets settled and such. Now I sit in me PPRuNeing chair frowning with the effort of trying to remember things simple things like who the freck is that filum star,whats the name of that bird on the telly, there,who wrote that,who said that,who was it that invented that thingy there,ect ect, frustratingly one knows the answer is in there somewhere but hid behind a kind of fog that surrounds one's noggin now,yet!! walked next door last night, SIL is recently into crosswords asked two questions of me and instantly the answers was there concise and direct almost without thought One has a theory that the crumbly brain is no longer capable of self stimulation it cannot be enabled from within itself,it has to be poked by the outside.
A desperate state of affairs Sir, if that is the case. Not for me, once snuffed it the lights will not go out. The youngsters will get old, very old, in the course of time - left with our blue bins.
One tends to acquire knowledge up to the age of about 50, then it's just a case of trying to control it's loss over the years beyond 50. Wisdom is a toothbrush. If you need it beyond 50, GOOD.
I have a lot of info on my brain hard drives but have trouble accessing it.
In spite of this my wife thinks I'm smarter than her because I can access a lot more than she. Than again she thinks in the near present while I think and compare against experience from the past.
Example, she ants to take a holiday trip to some plac. I remind her that we have already been there and visited the famous sights reminding her of the people we met etc. etc.. She replies really???
Now I will admit that when I compare information coming into my brain today with info already stored from the past, I am willing to update the bits and bytes and restore it as new memory.
Have probably posted this opinion before at some stage, but it's one of those things to become blindingly evident by an actual life experience.
I had been using an ATM card for about ten years with the same PIN. Then I found myself one day being prompted to enter my PIN and I had not a clue. Not just a case of slight furrowing of the brow as to the order of the four digits, the whole entity had disappeared, to the point where there was no point even making a guess. To avoid upsetting the queue behind me I walked away from the machine a little embarrassed but sure the number would come back to me. It never did. Ever. Cancel card, new card, new PIN etc.
From this experience I hypothesized that each brain cell carries a certain snippet of information, (which is why we have so many of them) and the particular cell containing my PIN had been one of those destroyed by the previous night's excesses.
Now I carry a piece of paper with my name and address on it in my wallet for the inevitable day when the brain cell containing that particular snippet goes west. Scoff not, I am serious about this. I will never forget the feeling of absolute confusion that overcame me in that ATM queue.
I read, somewhere(?) that brain cells die at a phenominal rate. Something like 10,000 per second. NEVER replaced!!! But it doesn't matter, cos there are BILLIONS of them crammed in your cranium. Mind you, a lot of people do seem to suffer some after-effects. Now where did I put my keys?
I have a lot of info on my brain hard drives but have trouble accessing it.
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frustratingly one knows the answer is in there somewhere but hid behind a kind of fog that surrounds one's noggin now
Opto-doctors point out that one may often see things more clearly in very dim light by looking at them sideways. The low-er energy red-sensing receptors in our eyes evidently are arranged in the outer circumference of the retinal vision sensor cell array, so they are not as populous in the center focus region where brighter and whiter light is aimed. Trusting one's steps in the dark on unfocussed "donut-vision" seems strange at first, but works surprisingly well.
Memory seems to work with similar indirection. Oftentimes, in fact, the harder one tries to think of a thing "on the tip of the tongue", the less one is able to recall it.
Greek philosphers contrived early-on the concept of "noema" as a sort of lens through which ideas could be seen in a conceptual focus. Nineteenth-century philosopher Soren Kirkegaard revived this idea to make a point whereby he suggested that persons might only once really perceive a Thing, and then - after the first instance, would always afterward see the Thing in terms of the recollection or experience of their first perception of it, plus the second perception and third, etc. Eventually, he argued, one might remove the Thing altogether and the perceiver might not notice the difference, because the Noema, the sum of perceptions of the Thing and experiences and reflections about the Thing, would replace the reality of the Thing itself.
So, too, with memory. If one has a slight stumble of recollection at a critical moment - just before uttering the thought or just when needing the keys to the car - then the flood of ideas, emotions, recollections and similar tangential relevancies surges into consciousness so strongly that it becomes a noematic roadblock to actually recalling what one so earnestly wishes to remember. A proven recipe for success in recovering from this dilemma, or multilemma, is to simply stop trying for awhile, change the subject, wash a dish or pet the dog for a bit and then, lo - the hard-sought thought will slip quietly into mental focus and view - much as the dim shadows of a hardly-seen sought object finds dark focus on the rim of one's vision in the thinnest starlight IF one can relax enough to let that happen.
Wisdom one reckons, is the distillation of memories and experience into a more concentrated essence - so that one may judge quickly and well as to efficacy and truth - at least insofar as to quickly judge, by some relevant standard, what is likely to work and what is not.
BINOS - Suggest you use your year of birth, highly unlikely you will ever forget that and not so easy for anyone to guess, (unless they have your driving licence!). Could always use it plus or minus a few years, say five.
Now I carry a piece of paper with my name and address on it in my wallet for the inevitable day when the brain cell containing that particular snippet goes west.
Bin there, dun that, admittedly a slip with a clue for a number, not my address.
No use at all; I forgot I had the clue in my wallet at the same time as I forgot the number.
