Well, the “Howdy” post by Deuce got me thinking. You see, I remember him, but I mainly just remember that his posts on the old Pnet boards were usually worth reading and often conveyed good, common-sense advice. But right now that’s all I remember, though more details may come back to me in a while. I’m thinking about this because just tonight I was poking around in my garage and found a special jig that apparently I had built to do a welding repair on something for my job. It’s obviously designed to aid in the repair of a very specific item, but I have no clue what that item was. I can envision the diameter of the item based on the wear marks on the jig, and if this is like other such things, I’ll probably remember all the details before I go to bed tonight (fuzzy details will come to light, and then, bam, I’ll know).
There was a time when I was much younger when I used to marvel at how it could be that my dad didn’t remember “everything”. Now I’m the same way, and I think he’s gotten worse so I probably will too as time goes by. If I don’t have an actual need to remember something, chances are good that I won’t. I guess I’m not too worried about it because all my life I’ve been hearing people older than I joking about their memory becoming worse with advancing age.
So, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve got this tool in my garage that I didn’t know was there, but I can see that it probably took me close to an hour to cut and weld the parts to make it, and yet I don’t even remember what it’s for. Who can relate to that? Who has a funny example?
I’m in the same boat but I’m fighting it. Getting enough sleep and no stimulants such as coffee has helped a great deal. Lots of exercise and a whole-food diet has helped me regain my memory. No aluminum (which means no antiperspirant or drinking out of aluminum cans) because it’s linked to Alzheimer’s. I think it’s when we give in to getting older instead of fighting it by becoming wiser that it over-takes us. We just lost my father-in-law to a long eight year battle with Alzheimer’s. It wasn’t pretty. If I can stop it or slow it down I’m going to do it.
My aunt is 95 or more I forget LOL. Her memory is 100%. Long term short term great grand children. Where there are want they are doing past events in the 40’s everyone’s birthday everyone’s death day. Always calls on the days my parents died. Balances people’s checkbooks to this day. Nothing escapes her with a mind like a computer. Every time I talk to her I hang up in amazement. Never smoked or drank. Long term short term she’s perfect. Had a hip replacement two years ago. No doctor wanted to do it except one. Guy said if you fell I’d have to operate so let’s do this.
I think the things Dave mentioned are good. The thing that amazes me is how different my wife’s memories are than mine. And how she has never forgotten the smallest detail of when I made her mad 40 years ago.
I think the things Dave mentioned are good. The thing that amazes me is how different my wife’s memories are than mine. And how she has never forgotten the smallest detail of when I made her mad 40 years ago.
Thems forgettin’ histry are doomed to repeat it.
If I could land that thought I’m sure I’d escheat it.
And the Lord of those manners are oft married lasses,
that keep close their count remembrin’ all his trespasses.
I can remember tons of stuff from 40 years ago too, including exact phrases spoken by others which upset me at the time, so I can relate to your wife remembering what made her mad. On the other hand, for the first six or seven years of my current job, I could remember every construction site I went to and what kinds of soils were at each. Now I forget that stuff easily, but by now, there have been thousands of job sites, thousands of soil conditions, hundreds of clients and hundreds of equipment operators. I think in that particular case, there’s just too much to remember and very little earns priority in my mind anymore. It’s the same with boat trips. I used to remember all kinds of details from every trip, but after doing many hundreds of trips, there’s just no way I can remember details from each one anymore, yet it feels like a downward slide that I can’t. I remember noteworthy events, and often can associate them with a particular trip, but often, only by river and time of year.
One reason I’m not terribly worried is that my dad, who as I mentioned, his memory became more fuzzy quite a while back, and like me, remembers stuff from ages ago extremely well but not so much from more recent times, recently started doing the taxes of most of the people in the extended family every year, in many cases involving lots of complex financial rules no one else has a handle on and seeking out certain info from financial institutions, as well as using spreadsheets of his own making to streamline the process. His mind is quite sharp even if, as Overstreet says, the retrieval process for some info is faulty. He’ll be 90 soon and I hope I’m still as sharp as he is at that age.
Oh, and I’m pretty sure I that I recalled what that jig I mentioned in my above post is for. I’ll have to test it to see if I’m right, but I think it’s for rebuilding worn edges of a type of cylindrical hammer that we use in the lab. If that’s the case, it’s a funny thing because I’ve rebuilt a few of those hammers more than once by working freehand. Odd that I’d tuck away the tool and forget about it, but I can speculate that it happened during a time when other stresses on the job (working with a true asshole can be worse than any other kind of work-related stress) kind of caused me to shut down much of the time for the purpose of self-preservation, and perhaps that could explain it.
As we age…Hard drive becomes full…RAM is still the same as when young and the Hard drive was relatively De-Fraged and optimized and relatively empty. So Old small RAM chip and FULL hard drive
Best Wishes
Roy
The more I memorize the more I forget. At least I’m smart enough now to write everything down.
My wife has the same kind of memory. Not only does she remember when I say or do something stupid, she remembers what I was wearing when I did it.
@string said:
I think the things Dave mentioned are good. The thing that amazes me is how different my wife’s memories are than mine. And how she has never forgotten the smallest detail of when I made her mad 40 years ago.
My second wife was like that. Of course she remembered so much because she repeated it so much, adding new items each time. In the end the sicker she got the less those things mattered and the less she brought it up. Perhaps if they remember the little things that’s good. It just means things have been pretty good.
@DrowningDave said:
Words to live by.
“Never memorize something that you can look up”
And yet, this is exactly what they ask you to do in every form of “educational institution”.
You can test facts and figures against those you can look up (or make up). That makes it easy to mark and grade results. True intelligence can’t be quantified near as easily, if at all.
In my work, I do a lot of “knowledge archeology”, trying to find and preserve knowledge that we have had in the company but have lost when key personnel disappeared.
On more than one occassion, I have digged into an old report on a subject, thinking that the person who wrote that must be quite clever. And then I find out that the author was actually myself, and I have completely forgotten that I wrote it…
Oh, another thing that I should also tell:
In my work, I do a lot of “knowledge archeology”, trying to find and preserve knowledge that we have had in the company. But I will tell about that another time.
@DrowningDave said
And yet, this is exactly what they ask you to do in every form of “educational institution”.
Not exactly. My first two years of college and all of out technical education skills training in the USAF aircraft and munitions maintenance was look it up. … Likely still is they just do it on a “notebook” or “I pad” now.
@DrowningDave said
And yet, this is exactly what they ask you to do in every form of “educational institution”.
Not exactly. My first two years of college and all of out technical education skills training in the USAF aircraft and munitions maintenance was look it up. … Likely still is they just do it on a “notebook” or “I pad” now.
On a similar note, for a whole lot of my college classes, and especially those in grad school, tests required thoughtful application of what was learned rather than simply providing memorized information. Sure you had to remember stuff, but it’s conceivable that you could remember every last detail and still get a failing grade. The key was to be able to use the information in ways that sometimes you might never even have predicted prior to seeing a specific problem on a test. I remember one class in particular that due to the nature of the test problems - the way they required innovated application of knowledge - the tests themselves were some of the most important learning tools of the class. I won’t say most professors are good at writing those kinds of tests, but those that can I rate as the best teachers. For those kinds of situations it would have been pretty hard to look up what you needed and then figure out how to apply it in any reasonable time frame, because if you didn’t already know what principles you needed to apply, you wouldn’t even be ready to just look stuff up, you’d first end up doing a research project. What I’m trying to say is that some things need to be committed to memory to get a job done.
@Guideboatguy said:
What I’m trying to say is that some things need to be committed to memory to get a job done.
Agreed. I’m the last one to call if you’re looking for absolutes. There’s a place for reference material, and for memorization.
I suspect that the schooling you’re describing was at least a few decades off from that which I experienced. I’ve been back to school for this and that throughout my life and have rarely encountered a curriculum or teaching style that promotes critical thinking.
I doubt the time frame has anything to do with it. I can’t imagine the classes I’m thinking of being taught and tested in any other way. Also, the professor I remember who wrote the best tests of all probably didn’t retire until sometime in the last few years, though he could even still be working. There are still people doing complex research for a living, and the nature of that, in the sciences at least, hasn’t changed, and the fact that most of those people teach also hasn’t changed.
