In alt.home.repair, on Sat, 22 May 2021 13:51:09 -0400, micky
wrote:


Well, I'm 75 and I plead ignorance. My brain has become saturated and I
try not to learn anything new because I need to forget something else to
make room :-).

I'm 74 and I can certainly appreciate that. In fact I heard that
Sherlock Holmes said so too. (I've told that so often without checking
first that even if he didnt' say it, I may have spread the story.)

Ironically, I'm probably learning more stuff now than ever before,
including when I was in school. I spend 3 or 4 hours a day on the web
reading one story after another. When I'm not doing that, I'm eating,
watching tv, and reading a news magazine on paper. And I think I
remember a lot of it, so I can only wonder what gets ejected from my
brain to make room.

My big problem now is not being able to think of the word I want or the
name of some famous person.

Just now it took me 5 minutes to think of the word symmetric. All I
could think of is symbiosis, a word I see and use 1/20th of the
frequency for symmetric.

But I also know I'm not getting stupid. There was a time, until age 45
or 50 or so that, except for routine things, I could remember every
place I'd ever been, everything I'd ever said, and everything I'd ever
done. I am now forgetting a few details (though sometimes after a
couple hours they come back to me.) I should have written my biography
earlier. It's too late now to do a good enough job.

But, I can remember loads of stuff from my childhood through age 30.
Life got more routine then so I can't remember every detail -- I can't
remember if I changed the springs on the '88 LeBaron or the '95 LeBaron,
or if I thought about it but never changed the springs at all.

But I did a lot of traveling from 2017 to 2019 and I can remember
hundreds of places, including what they look like. When I was doing
something interesting, now, years later, I can remember the road I drove
down, where I turned right, where I parked, where I walked, where I
stopped to eat, what the rocks looked like where I went to the beach.
I can picture intersections, and the layout of stores and movie lobbies
that I was in.

Doesn't it take more brain power and more brain storage to remember a
picture than a fact expressed in words? Would *our* brains be so
different from computer memory?

And when I look at a spot on a map, I see what I saw when I was there.
(That's a separate thing related to my close relationship to maps.)

I can from memory draw a map of the 2 countries I've been to lately,
including the shape of the country in detail, where cities are, the
roads between them, where "attractions" are, and within the cities the
major and sometimes the minor streets. I don't need a map anymore to
get around the cities or the country. Places I'd never been to before
2017.

But I can't remember what word I want to use, or the name of the person
who invented whachamacallit.

And where is my recycle bin?

Much of the stuff I can't rmemeber might still be in there, because
details come back to me sometimes after a few hours. But I don't know
how to speed this up or make it more frequent.