When Memory Starts Faltering
A couple of decades back, I had no need for a pocket notebook carrying phone numbers and addresses. Now, I never step out of the house without one. If I ever did that I felt as if I had stepped out of the house improperly dressed, almost naked. To avoid embarrassing myself, I have created a niche for the notebook in my wallet that I am accustomed to placing in my pocket before going out.
As a student, I never had to learn anything by rote. One attentive reading of any passage used to be enough to commit it to memory. Our exams being essentially tests of memory, I found myself at the top of the class almost always. As an official, I used to remember the phone numbers of literally scores of my colleagues. All that is history now.
A few days back, I spent almost an hour searching for my car at the multi-storied parking structure of a hospital. It was no solace to recall that Southern California has more cars than scores of foreign countries and several states in the US and that I was late for my appointment with the specialist I was to see for the first time in that hospital.
I had to accept the fact that my memory had started faltering. On my way home I started reflecting on the significance of memory in the life of a person. Our memories, it occurred to me, define who we are. They represent the repository of our personal past, our understanding of our selves, and our roadmap for dealing with the world. When you start losing your memory, it is like losing the recognition of who you are. Acts of mental slippage, I feared, might predict more serious problems to come. It might even lead to Alzheimer! That sent a cold shudder down my spine. I had to stop this negative train of thoughts, this gloomy tangential mental musing. So I pulled into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant to collect my thoughts and recompose myself. Let me step out of the car, take a few deep breaths and rest for a while, I counseled myself.
The thought of rest took me to the restroom and I started smiling. That had shifted the train of my thoughts. I pondered how euphemism had given a veneer and glitter to a basic human need. Euphemism – hypocrisy wrapped in politeness - turned a lavatory into a washroom, a toilette, a bathroom, a powder room, and now it is called a restroom. Interestingly enough, in the hectic life of America, this is the only place where a person can really find some rest. It is a haven for a shirker. No wonder, a lavatory is called a lavatory in an airplane; there is just no room for rest there.
The visit to the restroom did give me a break from the dark, wayward thoughts. I was back to my normal self, neither ebullient nor gloomy, but given to an analytical and objective approach to problems of life. Presently I recalled what Dr. Samuel Johnson, the famous lexicographer and wit, had said about memory. “The true art of memory is the art of attention.”
The lapse of memory as to where I had parked the car, I rationalized was the result of my lack of attention to the locale where I had parked the car in that huge structure. This temporary lapse, this mental malfunction, I maintained, was triggered by the anxiety to be on time for the appointment with the medical specialist whom I had never met before. The anxiety was aggravated further by the fear that my ailment could even be cancer. Subsequent tests disproved the apprehension. It turned out that my prostate was growing in an inverted proportion to the shrinkage of my brain cells. Anxiety creates stress and when we are under stress, we cannot think as well, remember effectively or pay attention to our surroundings.
The anxiety having thus been set to rest in the restroom, I thought I ought to do some reading on how to strengthen memory. The public library had literally scores of books on the subject. I took half a dozen home. Some of these were written by MDs - neurophysicians or surgeons. They were Greek and Latin to me. The others were written by psychiatrists commonly known as ‘head shrinkers’ or ‘shrinks’. They too were not sparing in the use of multisyllabic expressions. A couple of them were so verbose and complex that I could hardly wade through them to pick the gems of their thoughts.
One of them said: One of the most distressing prospects for adults is the thought of developing dementia or organic brain dysfunction. In the recent past the common wisdom was that a gradual progression into senility was an inevitable path followed by everyone. It wasn’t a matter of if; it was a matter of when.
While I was still reeling under this punch of the head shrinker, the derogator of my inherent optimism, I found him taking a U-turn and contending that more recent scientific data had shown that older adults had only a slight chance of developing senile dementia. This pulled me out of the bleak reverie. But, his flip-flop and the profuse use of professional jargon, made me put the book down of this ‘psychic’.
Another writer had a more positive offering. Forgetting, he said, can provide a useful buffer against life’s misfortunes and unpleasantries. Supposing you start forgetting the pleasant events of your life and remember only the sad episodes; such a memory lapse would be a barrier between you and your happiness. This happened with a near relation of mine who used to be bubbling with happiness and was blessed with an uncanny joie de vivre.
Almost all writers, pompous and pretentious or not, recommend regular mental exercises for improving your memory. Mental exercise, they contend, is as essential for your mind as is physical exercise for your body.
Regular physical exercise is considerably helpful in maintaining a healthy brain too, they advise. It would help clear the sludge build-up out of your brain and sharpen thinking and memory function. The best form of exercise is brisk walking, biking, and swimming. Get your heart rate up to between 100 and 120 beats per minute and sustain it for at least 20 minutes.
A very effective mental exercise is solving crossword puzzles. Had President Reagan been devoting hours to such puzzles, would he have staved off the onslaught of Alzheimer? If so, he might not have been able to thwart the Soviet Union. Nor, would it have been possible for the Afghan Mujahedeen, the freedom fighting Davids to defeat the Soviet Goliath. Come to think of it, President Reagan had to exercise his mind more intensely than he would have on crossword puzzles.
The former President, George ‘bring-them-on’ Bush, is a great fighter. Soon after the catastrophe of 9/11, he launched a war on terror and eliminated the Al Qaeda training sites in Afghanistan and forced the hodgepodge Taliban fighters underground and mostly across the border into Pakistan. Before taking this campaign against the terrorists to its logical conclusion by completely destroying Osama and his loyalists, his itch for war diverted his attention to Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction. Despite the unprecedented demonstrations throughout the world against the war, he went ahead and landed in the quagmire of Iraq. He would have been well advised to take some time off and devote it to crossword puzzles.
I am starting the puzzles soon.
arifhussaini@hotmail.com
