Quiz for boomers: Can you remember?

As we age, we have the always delightful joy of trying to juggle about 10 million pieces of information in our brains…things we’ve learned, things we’ve wished we could forget, things we have to deal with every day. It’s like having a giant filing cabinet that is bulging at the seams and really needs to be cleaned out occasionally. 

We’d like to be able to remember what we were doing 15 minutes ago. But instead, we have no clue. But we can tell you who sat next to us in fourth grade.

We’d like to remember the name of our neighbor. But instead, we can tell you about our favorite episode from the Lassie series.

What’s going on in our heads? Probably so much more than we think. Sometimes it can feel like our minds are slipping away…but it might just be that we’re making room for new “files.”

Can you relate to any of the following?   

• Your phone keeps making a strange sound, and randomly begins to play music. Then a “enable dictation?” message appears which you can’t remove from the screen. As you are trying to turn it off, you accidentally drop it into a bird bath. 

Do you:

1. Buy a new phone
2. Retrieve this phone and look to the heavens for help
3. Decide you really don’t need a phone and you never liked this one anyway
4. Where are my keys?

• 

• You are ready to settle in and watch an exciting sports event. You no longer have a cable service, as it was too unreliable and too expensive. Instead, you wisely selected an internet-based service that lets you get the channels you want without the high price. Just as the sporting event is about to start, your TV screen goes black and will not respond to your remote. 

Do you:

1. Change the batteries in your remote, then hit it as hard as you can against the table
2. Plug and unplug the television 23 times
3. Begin to recite an ancient curse known only to primitive Peruvian cultures
4. Where are my glasses?

• You decide to take yourself and your best friend to a nice restaurant for the evening. Once seated, you pick up your menu just as they dim the lights about 40%. You now cannot see anything, and you’ve once again left your glasses at home.

Do you:

1. Give your menu to the people at the next table and ask them to hold it up so you can read it
2. Have whatever your friend is having
3. Try to read it through your water glass, hoping it will magnify the words, only to spill the entire glass all over the table just as the waiter shows up
4. Where did I park my car?

• Extra credit: 

You get up off the couch to take the clothes out of the dryer. As you pass the kitchen, you realize you never put up the milk, so you stop and open the refrigerator, which reminds you that you didn’t finish that list you started a few hours ago. In looking for the list, you realize it’s probably in your home office because you got a call in the middle of doing it, so you go there, but you don’t see it. However, you notice you left the printer on and as you turn it off, you see that you didn’t pay that bill you meant to mail today. You take the bill and a check to the kitchen but can’t find any stamps…then remember you bought some earlier so they might be on the kitchen table. You find the stamps, put the bill in the mailbox, and notice when you come back inside the garage that you forgot earlier to put up the dog food. Now you’re back in the house and you hear the dryer come on again so you stop to fold the clothes. You walk back into the kitchen and see the grocery list you’d look for earlier, so you think you might as well go get the items now. But you have no idea where your car keys are.

Do you:

1. Look in all the usual places (pockets, freezer, floor, inside the car, in your hand)
2. Meditate in order to visualize where your keys are
3. Call someone and ask them where they think your keys are
4. Where was it I wanted to go anyway?

The good news is we aren’t losing it all. In fact, things like exercise, good nutrition, adequate sleep, lifelong learning and even playing a musical instrument can boost our brain cells and keep us sharp. And while our short-term memory might be a little fuzzy, our reasoning skills and ability to see the big picture actually not only improve, but outshine those of our younger counterparts.

So maybe the best thing to do is just keep taking in new information and new experiences, and be easy on ourselves when recall is not what we’d like. Just think of all the “stuff” in your mental filing cabinet…letting some of that go could be a really good thing.

So this holiday weekend, enjoy yourself. Don’t shoot off any fireworks (all the dogs in your neighborhood and Veterans will thank you). Be gentle with yourself. Keep rockin’.

And by the way, your keys are right where you left them.

“Why fit in when you were born to stand out?” Dr. Seuss