Memory and Survival
Don’t bemoan your failing memory as you age. It is to be expected and not necessarily totally as a result of age. When people are young, everything is new and interesting. Everyone has observed how small children take things apart to see what’s inside. It is the curiosity of the new experience that fixes our attention.
As we accumulate life experiences most things no longer seem to be worthy of our attention. We do not dwell upon the details of the everyday events. In short, they do not impress us. It is the depth of the ‘impression’ that registers whether the information should be stored or not. We forget things because we have not ‘remembered’ them to start with.
Along with this ‘forgetting’ is the very common problem of not remembering names. It’s similar to what I said above. We have met so many people in our lives that when we meet someone new we don’t know whether they will be of any significance to us so the name given at the introduction does not get stored in our memory banks.
It is only after some conversation that we decide whether that person should be remembered or not. At that point, we remember the face but not the name and we are usually too embarrassed after talking with someone for a half hour to ask them what their name is. To do so implies to them that we didn’t care enough who they are to remember their name. The truth is that generally they don’t remember our name either.
Actually the ‘name/face’ dilemma has some deeper roots than what I just wrote.
Names are a recent addition to the social structure of humanity. Visual recognition is much more important to survival. Every encounter with another human or animal became a matter of survival. If you did not recognize the person coming toward you, your existence could be threatened.
Like it or not, this was the basis of ‘racial profiling’. We as primitive people had to decide instantly whether the other person was of our family, village or our tribe.
That uncertainty is why we are here today. Our ancestors who didn’t spontaneously possess that fear or uncertainty would have no doubt been killed if they could not differentiate between friend or foe.
Today we recognize that the world is a violent place and so we are becoming fearful again for our survival. We look at people and associate color or ethnicity with a new fear.
It is a sad testament to social progress that took so many years to achieve that we find ourselves slipping back into a primitive survival mode.
