I have become aware that I do not remember some things that people tell me. Yes, that happens to everyone, but with me it seems more frequent. I have on a few occasions forgotten serious, personal information that people I am close to have told me. Sometimes I remember bits and pieces of it. Occasionally, it is simply gone, and I have no memory even of being told. No, despite my age, I do not think it is dementia, because, having seen that it is a pattern and not random, I realize that I have always been this way. That is in fact one way of stating it: this is not a decline but a sudden insight into what I have always been. And it seems built in: a feature, not a bug. It resembles dementia, however, in the way it isolates. We all see how people with dementia are marooned on a kind of island, to some degree cut off from the full experience of life. My forgetfulness produces the same result but has a different origin, or so I think. Hearing loss, which
Even Northrop Frye, who was said to have a photographic memory, once realized that he had confused the Montreal poets A.M. Klein and Eli Mandel in a closing reference as he returned to the office. He was already 70 and past the official age of retirement, but he shook his head as he told his secretary, "That never used to happen to me."
Ah, yes, we all live in dread of that kind of crossed-wires error. In class it doesn't much matter--you can always correct yourself next time. More embarrassing if it is in public--at a conference, on a podcast, or even in print. I've probably told you of the time I told him that he had misquoted Dylan, and he did not look pleased. "There are no truths outside the Garden of Eden" should have read "gates of Eden." But he really did that very rarely.
Even Northrop Frye, who was said to have a photographic memory, once realized that he had confused the Montreal poets A.M. Klein and Eli Mandel in a closing reference as he returned to the office. He was already 70 and past the official age of retirement, but he shook his head as he told his secretary, "That never used to happen to me."
Ah, yes, we all live in dread of that kind of crossed-wires error. In class it doesn't much matter--you can always correct yourself next time. More embarrassing if it is in public--at a conference, on a podcast, or even in print. I've probably told you of the time I told him that he had misquoted Dylan, and he did not look pleased. "There are no truths outside the Garden of Eden" should have read "gates of Eden." But he really did that very rarely.
This happened to me already as a Teaching Assistant. I found I could buy time by turning my "blank" into a question to the class.