I remember the day I thought I was losing my memory. I couldn’t spell “toad,” a deceptively simple word. I tried, “tode,” “toed,” and “told.” Fail. Fail. Fail.
Considering I earn a wage writing, this was a disturbing circumstance. Expecting the worst, I scoured the Internet to determine what malady might have caused my spelling gaffe and memory blockage, but memory issues were too complicated to self-diagnose.
I was concerned. Shouldn’t a man in his late 20s remember how to spell words in his native language? Come to think of it, why do I misplace my car keys so often? And why am I forgetting about scheduled interviews?
So I began a journey to understanding my memory: What are memories and how long are we allowed to keep them?
The science of memories is complex, so complex that professionals dealing with a person’s ability to remember shudder at the subject. Dawn Westfall, a speech and language pathologist at HealthSouth Deaconess Rehabilitation Hospital, is one such professional.
Westfall works with patients daily on their memories. Her patients have had strokes, suffered from multiple sclerosis, or experienced an accident that caused a brain injury. The reason medical professionals struggle with quick, easy fixes for memory issues is the same reason Westfall shudders. “Memory gets very complex with the brain because memory is a process,” she says. “It uses almost all areas of the brain.” The hippocampus is one part of the brain that receives much credit for the memory process, and while it plays a role, forget that notion. When it comes to the brain, memory is a group activity.
The memory process begins with input — people touch, hear, see, smell, and taste. Then, they have to store it. “The key is to (store information) in a very organized fashion just like if we talk about storage in a garage,” Westfall says. “If we put all our car parts on one shelf and all of the car cleaning supplies on another shelf, we’re going to be able to locate that information a lot faster than if it looks like my garage at the time where everything is just kind of everywhere.” Ditto for brains. You have to organize your memory.
Making these types of memories is an active process, but other types, not so much. For example, Nannette Stump says, “There’s memory that is a very fixed memory, a memory that I often think of as automatic — as in everybody knows their birthday, they know their social security number, they know their phone number. Those are very atomized kinds of memory. It tends to be a fairly fixed memory.”
Stump is a psychologist at St. Mary’s Medical Center. She deals with patients undergoing “psychological issues related to medical events: brain injuries, spinal cord injuries, strokes — anything that would land somebody in a hospital,” she says. Many of her patients experience some sort of memory deficit.
She helps people deal with other types of memories, including the procedural kind such as “how to feed yourself, how to ride a bike,” says Steve Fosnaugh, a St. Mary’s speech and language pathologist. “Some of those (memories) stay with people, often times even in a disease where what you did this morning is often gone. People need to understand that there’s all different types of memory, many types.”
But the types of memories Stump and Fosnaugh help patients with most often are the same kinds of memories Westfall talks about and the same types people without medical complications need help with.
Let’s say you have a “bad memory.” You frequently misplace your car keys or forget about scheduled interviews. What can you do?