Now where was I??
I will come clean and admit it - I have a very poor short term memory.
We’re talking at the level of an absent-minded goldfish here.
But in the age of Google and smartphones, where the function of memory has been delegated to 1s and 0s on a silicon chip, is that really such a bad thing?
Back in the 1980s I was a salesman for an exhibition stand company. I had on my desk a Rolodex (you might want to google that, kids), with the phone numbers of all my prospects and customers. If you threw any one of around 15 or 20 customer names at me, I could rattle off their phone number no problem. I phoned them regularly and their numbers became burned into my short term memory. If I was not next to my Rolodex – maybe in a phone box (remember those?), then such wide recall was not only invaluable, it was necessary. I didn’t want to carry my Rolodex around, or transcribe the numbers into a phone book, either. So I relied on my prodigious memory.
Or if I drove anywhere once, and knew I would need to find my way there again, then I would easily memorise it, turn by turn, street name by street name, so I could navigate the next time without any mistakes.
And as a salesman, I knew how important it was to listen actively and remember names, so I could build relationships and sales.
Fast forward to the present day, and it’s a whole different story. Now I struggle to remember where I put my keys, let alone memorise a phone number (beyond my own mobile), and if I need to drive somewhere, I use the sat nav every time – meaning I couldn’t tell you the route I’d taken even if I had just arrived. And that’s not counting the number of mistakes I’d have made en-route, where one turning on the screen looks much like another.
And although I still try and listen actively and remember names, I do find it a real struggle, unless the person has a physical characteristic that reminds me of someone I know well.
Is it an age thing? I know memory gets poorer as we get older, but maybe it’s a double whammy – a combination of increasing years and less and less use of memory in everyday situations? Maybe memory is like a muscle – if you don’t use it, you lose it. And as we don’t need to use it anywhere near as much as we used to, we’re losing it. I mean, if you want to remember something these days, it’s a case of needing only to remember one thing - where to find the information. Is it on Facebook or WhatsApp? Was it in a post on LinkedIn? Or is it something you can quickly google? Although to be fair, I can become a tad bewildered if I can’t remember which ****ing platform a message came in on, especially if it’s on my phone.
I often find myself waking up in the middle of the night, struggling to remember some inconsequential bit of trivia. All six characters in Friends? The original seven Mercury astronauts? The names and nicknames of each Spice Girl? No problem, just reach for the phone and google it. Although strangely enough I can tell you without resorting to my phone that Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey wrote Grease, and Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein wrote Fiddler on the Roof (feel free to google that one as well, kids). At least there’s some trivia I can recall – although that pales into insignificance, compared to what I used to be able to remember. Indeed, there was once a time where no-one in my family would play Trivial Pursuit with me, as I could bring out some random fact from the back of my head, and astound them with my ability to answer the most obscure question. My then wife was truly gobsmacked when I correctly answered a question with the answer ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’ – not only had she never heard of it, but she could not believe that I had either, or even knew what it was. To this day she still thinks I cheated (I didn’t - I just darned well remembered it).
I suppose ultimately we will end up with some chip implant taking over the function of memory completely. We will then be able to google the answer to any obscure question without picking up our phone or even twiddling our thumbs on a screen. Our biological memory will then dwindle to nothing, but wow - our bionic memory will be phenomenal! Of course, it will probably mean the end of the pub quiz and TV game shows, as everyone will be able to operate at the level of a Mastermind champion, but maybe that will be a small price to pay for going back to having a good memory – and indeed even a better memory than when I could rattle off the phone numbers of 15 or 20 long forgotten 80s companies.
Now, what was it I was about to do?