Try to remember | Opinion

I remember going to a theater in Greenwich Village in the 1960s to see “The Fantastics,” the longest running play of that time. The memory is clear even now, so why do more recent memories slip out of my grasp? Every time it happens, I worry. I took remembering for granted.

I was in a supermarket trying to remember the name of a product I wanted. A clerk was nearby.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for a cleanser and I can’t think of the name. It’s liquid and has a very strong smell.”

“Clorox?” the clerk asked.

“Yes, that’s it!”

Why didn’t i remember the name? My friend reassured me when I told her.

“It’s system overload,” she explained. “We have more than a half-century’s worth of information in our brains and retrieving it is challenging.”

The names, dates and events experienced over the years are there in the creases and crevices of our brain waiting to be released, but sometimes we can’t get them so quickly. They usually come in the middle of the night. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could send obsolete, outdated information to a recycle bin and leave room for current data obscured by the detritus?

A 2014 study found a ”crowdedness” effect when the brain becomes too filled with information and also a lifetime of memories.

In a health physical, I complained that I forget names and words. The doc said I could take a cognitive assessment test. Although I am not a “stable genius” like a former president, I did OK. I felt better, but not completely.

Cognition slows as we grow older, but neuroscientists tell us not all forgetting is age related. My children complain that I interrupt when they are talking, but if I don’t speak when the thought occurs, I may forget.

Larry David, television writer and performer, talked about different conversational styles in New York as opposed to California.

In California, he said, people wait for the speaker to finish before speaking whereas his East Coast family interrupts when they have something to say.

The ability to remember peaks in our 20s and then declines. When younger people forget or can’t find a word, they don’t think, “Oh! oh! I’m losing it!” They have excuses: poor sleep, busy schedules, background noise, distraction, lack of concentration.

As the population ages, more studies are devoted to memory and aging. Washington University’s School of Medicine in St. Louis has been studying aging cognitive function. Their goal is to develop prevention, treatment and cures for Alzheimer’s disease. Vanderbilt University is another “memory and aging project” with a longitudinal study focusing on vascular health and brain aging. All the research agrees that exercise, mental and physical, can slow the decline of memory cells and encourage production of new brain cells.

There are different ways of thinking about remembering. One view takes the position I once read.

“Remembering is the most overrated thing. Forgetting is far superior.” And, “Forgetting is the cost of living cheerfully.”

Dorothy Dworkin is a freelance writer and writing teacher.