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.
Good old Marty Feldman. Back in the day, I thought his face must be the equivalent of ambidextrous and double jointed.
Marti had monocular vision, but it was the result of eye health issues and surgeries intended to repair those issues which unfortunately exacerbated them. He wasn’t born with it and apparently he couldn’t move his eyes into a position where he would have binocular vision. The result was that he couldn’t maneuver in a straight line.
Kit Williams, the artist behind the treasure hunt book, Masquerade had true monocular vision and could look at an object with one eye and at a canvas with the other eye and paint what he saw. His eyes could move independently under his control and he could somehow process that bidirectional data.
He was a human chameleon.
My father had monocular vision due to a baseball accident when he was a kid He grew up and became a dentist. I didn’t learn this interesting fact until years after his death. It seemed a rather odd career choice to me.
Oh, I SO identify with this post! Another memory glitch is that I’ll remember some intriguing or at least unusual event/fact/narrative that someone has told me in, say, the past week, but I’m unable to recall WHO told me or what the context was in which I was told. Completely unable. It’s as if a little glimmering item is hanging in a void, suspended by invisible thread and spotlit by my memory bank. Huh! Where’d THAT come from???
This. So often. I know I have told a story recently, but I don’t know to whom. And I can’t access the rolodex of people I have spoken to in the last week. This usually culminates in me telling the same story to someone who looks at me incredulously and thinks: she’s slipping. And I have.
Wonderful tumbling blocks quilt with appliqué (I guess? ) bear.
ceci
Appliqué DOG and appliquéd loose blocks.
When I see an older person on Jeopardy, I’m always jealous that they can come up with an answer so quickly–and ring in on the buzzer. My brain could finally come up with the answer, but it would be the middle of the night.
The French actually have a phrase for that: L’esprit d’escalier, or the spirit of the staircase, meaning you only think of the right answer or clever comeback as you are ascending the stairs to go to bed. I know the feeling well.
I still treasure the moment I thought of the exact right thing to say to someone who really deserved a comeuppance, and I delivered it with force in the moment. Sigh. It was a wonderful minute.
OMG “sludgy”!! Along with “beehive city”—my experience exactly! And to be honest, with me it’s not just age; I think it’s constitutional, and now I just get to blame aging when I do something particularly ditzy, or only start to actually take in information three sentences into what someone is telling me. (Whose sister are you talking about, again?)
It’s actually great to read I’m not alone in this dilemma of having a brain that’s only tangentially connected to the reality of the moment, much of the time.
Nasty how you can maintain an interested look when inside you’re just catching up with what was said three sentences ago. I don’t love this development.
I love the picture of the quilt dissolving into an Escher painting.
Next time you visit, you get that quilt. To sleep under. I’m keeping the quilt.
This reminds me of my Gram. She started knitting me a lap blanket in colors to match my sofa at that time. Her dementia had started. She evidently forgot how many stitches were required, and added another stitch or two to each row. As a result it was much wider at the bottom than the top. She hadn’t noticed, so I never mentioned it. We set it on the back of the couch, only opening it up in fall & winter. Nobody else noticed either. I’ve cherished that blanket as an emblem of her love, no matter the shape.
Wonderful story and love that you never mentioned it to her. Thanks on behalf of Grams everywhere!