Memory. Oops.

I can't remember how many times I've bumped into someone familiar--in some cases, a person I've known or worked with for years--and can't recall his or her name.

The worst is when that person recognizes me and I don't recognize them.  I try to strike a cool and familiar pose.   Gee, I haven't seen you since . . . when?  (Fill in the blank, pl-e-a-s-e.)  When this tack fails, I start going through the alphabet in my head.  A..b..c..d..e..f..g. . .   If I'm lucky, one of the first 8-10 letters will pull the switch that conjures up a name to go with the face.  If I'm not, I smile and mumble through the requisite small talk until we part, and then kick myself 10 minutes later when the name pops into my head.

Memory has been in the news this week, although the media hasn't reported it as an age-related issue, even if it might be.  Texas Governor, Rick Perry, during a televised debate among Republican presidential hopefuls on Thursday, couldn't remember the title of a third federal department he has been repeatedly campaigning to eliminate.  He could name two of three (Education and Commerce).  But the third (Energy) was lost in the fog of his 61-year-old brain.  In the spotlight, on national TV, for almost a minute, he hemmed and hawed, his mind a blank.  Even with prompting from the moderator and fellow candidate, Ron Paul, he couldn't recall which third department he would axe.  All he could finally say was, "Oops."

We've all been there.  Fortunately, it's rarely or never with the cameras rolling.  Despite the fact that I disagree with almost everything Perry says and stands for, when I watched a replay of the debate, I was squirming as he squirmed.  I knew he was mentally digging like a mad dog for a bone, trying to remember.   And I also knew that the harder he tried, the further that bone would bury itself in the rocky soil of his mind.

So why do we forget?  Psychologists acknowledge that our brains are handling more tasks simultaneously than ever (like driving, texting and unwrapping a bacon cheeseburger, while dealing with a navigations system that keeps "recalculating") making it hard to wade through the mess to find what we need.  They also point to stress as an inhibitor for memory.   Neurologist David Diamond mentions an additional factor:  that the language center and memory center of the brain are not close together.  "It's like New Jersey trying to communicate with China," he is quoted as saying in yesterday's Washington Post.

So, despite all this, why is it that retirement has resulted in what, to me, seems an improvement of my memory?  Maybe it's because I have fewer things to occupy my attention, although I keep busy with family, friends, reading, writing, travel, website management, and foreign language study.  It's just plain easier to focus without a houseful of teenagers and stacks of papers to grade.  All of that also makes for less stress.  So there's less interference in the circuitry, even if age means the actual physical connections in the brain may be narrowing from super highways to country one lane roads (or in the case of some of us, from country roads to game paths).

Recent research suggests that memory loss and deterioration of mental faculties associated with aging have been exaggerated.  So if you see a card-carrying AARP member searching for a word in conversation, that does not mean she's any less capable a thinker than she was 40 years ago.  In fact, the opposite may be true, the result (if she is lucky and healthy) of less stress and interference, and maybe, too, of thoughtful experience--a condition that we label wisdom.