When you’re young, your brain is nimble and stretchy. When you’re old, your brain is still stretchy but it doesn’t always snap back. It gets all baggy around the hippocampus.

This might account for the condition of my brain, which takes in information slowly, and makes sense of it in a similarly leisurely manner. It’s called Slow Processing Speed, and the experts don’t think of it as a good thing. The experts lack imagination.

The way I look at it, I’m just more proactive about clearing the cache up there. And I’m not taking in information slowly. I’m taking it in reluctantly. I don’t see any upside to slamming in new information without checking it out first. You want to leave it in the mudroom to dry out a bit. You don’t want an idea tracking stuff in all over your nice clean brain.

My research into this phenomenon came about when it was observed that I take rather a long time to notice that I have a play in Solitaire. Quite a number of minutes can roll by before I notice there’s a red king I can put my black queen on. Empires can rise and fall before I move a card. It’s kind of relaxing. I can even run through the deck twice to make sure I have no plays, and then I do it one more time just in case, and sure enough, there’s a play after all. Every few minutes, a new redemption!

Call me prudent about ingesting new information. Who can blame me? Have you seen the news? Maybe I’ve adapted to the point of not even noticing a red king. And honeys, if there really is a pee-pee tape, I don’t want to see it.

Along with a slow processing problem—if a problem it is—I have a retention problem. I assure you, inside my head it’s beehive city. There’s plenty going on in there. It just looks sludgy where it intersects with the outside world. If you’re trying to tell me something, I’ve zoned out halfway through. Also, I won’t remember who you are or what you’re doing on my porch. But inside, things is buzzing like mad. Buzzing, static, little eepy noises, a Fats Waller soundtrack—whatever. Why retain new stuff when it only makes me bloaty and irritable?

It could be helpful on occasion. I have sewn a lot of quilts. But a year or more might pass between projects. And every time I start a new one, I run into some kind of problem that requires me to do some basic arithmetic. Nothing fancy, but still maybe a step up from the Area of Farmer Brown’s perfectly rectangular field. And I’ll churn through the calculations and end up with a solution that I recognize as soon as I arrive at it, because I did the very same calculation the last time I quilted. I’ll do it the next time too. It’s that retention issue.

There could be something to be said for taking in new information easily and retaining it. Perhaps it would then be possible to build on what you’ve already learned. Perhaps some day you, with your big brain, will solve a problem that has confounded mathematicians for a thousand years. Good for you! You’ve revolutionized number theory. You’ll be the toast of academia. Ten whole people in the world will understand what you did. FIFA will just go ahead and stamp you a medal.

But I’ll have more quilts.