Never underestimate your ability
to forget. Your whole life — at age 5, 15, 35 — you’ve demonstrated
expert skill at forgetting things, and you’ll remain that way
until the end of your days. How does it help to know that? For
one thing, it changes the questions you have to answer. Instead
of asking “Why do I
forget?” maybe what you should really be
asking is “Why do I remember?” That question has many answers,
but if you’re worrying about your memory the simplest answer
is probably this: because you paid attention.
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Concentrating takes effort. In fact, most memory
complaints have nothing to do with the actual ability of the
brain to remember things. They come from a failure to focus properly
on the task at hand. The brain is wired to tune out inputs that
don’t spell S-U-R-V-I-V-A-L. Remembering the name of your girlfriend’s
cat is not the first thing on your mind. So stop, concentrate,
link it to someone or something with the same name.
Everyone
who spends part of the year in a cold climate knows that it’s
not unusual for people to feel a little more “down” in the winter
than in the summer — an experience some have described
as a kind of “emotional hibernation.” But for others winter can
bring on a much more acute form of the common winter blues, a
condition that triggers severe depression and sometimes even
suicide. It has recently acquired a name: Seasonal Affective
Disorder, or SAD.
