The real reason why we forget as we get older

I keep thinking I have a pretty good grasp of consensual reality and a
pretty good memory. But a few days ago, when I was trying to tell someone
about the revisionist fairy tales and other stories I write for Feminism
and Religion, I couldn’t bring the word I wanted to mind. I was aiming
for—oh, gee, I’ve just forgotten it again. When this happens, I’ve learned
to let it rest for a little while. What I’m looking for always appears,
though occasionally it can take all day to pop up. Ah, there it is! I was
looking for “satires.” Perfectly ordinary word. But not quite on the tip
of my tongue. Or at my fingertips. When I’m editing and an author makes
a poor word choice—a creature with a
vacillating tail, a house built of
troglodyte, the
throws of passion, the
roughage of an old woman’s throat—my job is to supply the correct
word. But it doesn’t always pop right into my mind. Sometimes I have to
sit here for a couple minutes and run through my mental thesaurus until
I can grab it. Has this ever happened to you? Sure, it has. When we forget
a word or a name, it is not, however, a so-called senior moment, nor is
it the onset of dementia. Our brains are just too crowded with information.
It’s a traffic jam in there!




The experts, of course, can give us good, scientific reasons why we forget.
These reasons are based on brain chemistry, brain cells, synapses, and
tangles of plaque in our heads. They’re no doubt correct. I’ve read some
very interesting books about brain chemistry and fMRI and other discoveries.
But science doesn’t keep me from hewing to my own theory of why we forget
as we age




Here’s my favorite metaphor. Picture this. The inside of your head is
a big room. There are file cabinets in it, old-fashioned ones with drawers
you pull out and files inside them that are overstuffed with papers. No
modern technology. No thumb drives or external hard drives or disks. Paper.
Lots and lots of paper. Your brain room is jammed full of papers upon which
is written (or typed) everything you’ve ever learned, seen, heard, or experienced.




When we’re little, it’s a tiny room and there’s maybe one cabinet. As
we grow, the room magically expands and additional cabinets are trucked
in. And there are messengers in there, too. Cute little forest critters,
like mice and fawns and bunnies and the occasional coyote, all of them
wearing cute little jackets and caps, all of them singing in cute little
warbly voices. You want to remember who your second-grade teacher was?
One of the cute little bunnies dashes to the Age 7 filing cabinet, pulls
out the Second Grade drawer, and comes back with a paper with the teacher’s
name on it. Mrs. Lane. Plus stories about her. She wore dark blue wooden
bracelets that clacked together. She had a windup Victrola in the classroom.
Before Christmas vacation, she brought in a radio and played
A Christmas Carol with Lionel Barrymore as Ebenezer Scrooge. (It
was on the radio from 1934 to 1953.)

Think about how big that room must be by the time you finish high school.
When you graduate from college. If you paid attention in your classes,
you added half a dozen filing cabinets each year. One of my filing cabinets
holds all the boring philosophy I had to listen to the year my husband
majored in philosophy. It also holds the folk songs he sang and the guitar
etudes he played. I earned two graduate degrees in English, so I have more
cabinets filled with lessons in English grammar, the complete works of
Shakespeare and Milton, plus a lot of history and comparative religion,
even some French. My computer and technology cabinet, however, is pretty
barren. I’d rather hire people to do the technical stuff. I still read
a lot of history, so that cabinet is getting more and more overfilled.

But it’s good to have all those files in my head. While I’m editing, I
have to know enough to know when something is just plain wrong and I need
to do some fact checking for an author. I have to be able to tell an author
who wrote a children’s book about a shepherd who visits the baby Jesus
that, no, the inn that had no room for Mary and Joseph was not owned by
a
gemütlich German family. There were no Germanic tribes in the Roman
colony of Judea during the reign of Augustus. I have to give another author
the correct date of the Terror during the French Revolution. (The Terror
started in 1793.) I have to inform another author that the planet with
two suns is Tatooine. I have to be able to tell some authors to use fewer
adverbs so they can avoid writing Tom Swifties (“I’ve always been a successful
tennis player,” Tom said winningly. “Where’s my coat?” Tom asked coldly),
which are usually inappropriately humorous.

The room in my head? It’s really big and it’s totally filled with ceiling-high
filing cabinets whose drawers are so stuffed they’re impossible to close.
There’s paper all over the floor, too, piles and stacks of papers upon
which are scrawled esoteric and probably useless facts. (Hatshepsut lived
in Egypt before they called the rulers pharaohs, and because she was the
king of Egypt, she wore a false beard for official ceremonies.) And you
know what? My cute little forest critters are about as old and busy as
I am. They’re exhausted. They don’t always remember where to look for stuff
they used to be able to find right away, so now they just yell at me to
try Google. Some days I can’t help but wonder when the cute little forest
critters are gonna throw off their little jackets and caps and run away.
When will my brainy room and the filing cabinets in it either implode or
explode? Hopefully I’ll be able to let you know when that happens. Meanwhile,
if you find yourself forgetting things you know darn well you know, just
be patient and tell the cute little messengers in your filing room to look
in another cabinet. And to tidy up the papers on the floor as soon as they
have time.