An older woman out in public ran into an old friend she hadn’t seen for a long time. They started chatting, decided to have coffee, etc. She kept trying to think of the other woman’s name and just couldn’t. Finally she said, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t remember your name. Will you tell me, please, what your name is?” The other woman thought and then asked, “How soon do you need to know?”
The older we get, the more relevant that joke is. We just don’t remember very well. If we remember at all, it’s a lot slower than it used to be.
I had two sisters. Still have one. Both quite pretty. So I don’t like the term “ugly sisters” very much, but brain scientists tell us that it’s the “ugly sisters” who create so many of our old age memory problems.
Ugly sisters are memories that are sort of like the memory we are trying to construct.
That’s a key—construct. Because we don’t remember a memory, we re-construct it.
Here is a very crude synopsis of how memory works: An event happens. It comes to us in sight and sound and smell and emotion, to the hippocampus part of the brain. The hippocampus takes all those different elements and combines them into a whole. But, unlike you’d think of something named for hippos [yes, I know], the hippocampus is relatively small. It does not have room for all the different memories it is creating. So it farms them out to other parts of the brain… but not all in one place. There are different places for smells and sounds and sights and emotions. Then you want to remember that “memory,” your hippocampus has to re-call them and recombine them. That’s when the ugly sisters appear…
…because you have lots of smell and sound and sight and emotion stuff from the past in your brain. The older you are, the more of it you have. And the hippocampus has to look all through your brain to get the right elements together to recreate that former event, what we call a memory. When people say their memory is slow because they have so many memories, they are right!
But say you’re trying to remember the name of the car dealer who sold you that Ford Fiesta. The Ford car is stored in the same place in your brain as Gerald Ford. Isn’t he the one that Lyndon Johnson said he played too much football before they invented the helmet? And fiesta is Mexican, isn’t it? Was the Ford Fiesta manufactured in Mexico? Don’t they have tacos at fiestas? Oh, oh… ugly sisters. All understandable, but you begin to think about Gerald Ford and Lyndon Johnson and football and tacos. Those are the ugly sisters. Nothing wrong with them in themselves, but they are leading you away from the memory you are trying to recreate about that Ford Fiesta.
There is no simple solution to memory retrieval, nor to the ugly sisters. They are there, a part of life. And just like the rest of life, you have to resist the temptation, as consciously and as focused as you can, and stick to the most important thing.
I used to worry about new and interesting ways that I could present a biblical story or a theological truth in a sermon. Helen said, “You worry about that too much. You have only one thing to do in a sermon, to remind us that God loves us.”
When the ugly sisters show up, just turn away and say, “My memory might not be very good, but God loves me.”
John Robert McFarland
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