My memory is notoriously bad. I feel awful when my children ask me about things from their childhoods and I look blank. Or, even worse, they remind me about a conversation we had the week before and I have no recollection of it at all.
This week though I had four whole seconds of complete blankness.
I was dropping a friend off at her house – one of those terraces in Bristol where you have to take your chance on finding somewhere to park on the road. “I bet you don’t have this problem at your house,” she said.
I thought about it, but couldn’t for the life of me picture my street. Did I have to park on the road? Did I have a drive? I thought about it some more, but really wasn’t sure where I lived. The moment lasted a good three or four seconds. Count to four in your mind now – it’s quite a long time to not be able to remember where you live.
So what I want to know is, is this normal??
We all lead very busy lives nowadays, and have a lot of information coming at as from a lot of different angles. When I was younger it was face to face communications, the television, the telephone, (plugged into the wall at home), and print media. Now it’s all of the above, plus the vastness that is the internet. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, news websites, emails – it’s a never ending stream of facts and figures, most of them completely unnecessary.
So is it to be expected that some things will get forgotten? Is it natural that as our brains get fuller and fuller, we will struggle to hold it all inside our heads?
Do you find yourself forgetting simple things, or am I losing the plot?
Image – conrado/shutterstock.