What is my name?

Lucy was upset with everyone in the office. She could not find her spectacles and had been searching the room for it for about five minutes.  And then she started threatening jokingly that if she did not find it “she will go to her hometown”.

Knowing which part of the country she came from, her colleagues immediately showed more interest in what she was looking for and asked her about it . When she replied that it was her spectacles, one of them  asked her if  what she was looking for was  different from what she was wearing. She touched it, nodded and slowly headed back to her desk in surprise. She had been looking for something right under her nose!

This is not fiction , it is a true story. Take this other one of Naa  Amatsoo who says she  often walks to the refrigerator, opens it and forgets what she is looking for until she goes back  to where she  originally was and retraces her steps.

Forgetting seems to be part of our normal lives and many people have stories to tell about some things they have forgotten, some they sometimes remember and others that never make it back to their memory.

When forgetting becomes forgetfulness that  interferes with daily activities, it becomes a different matter altogether.

Forgetting

Forgetting is  the inability to retrieve information from memory. The study of forgetting was pioneered by a German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885 – 1964) by testing his own ability to forget over 2,000 nonsense syllables he created himself. Memory formation is basically by three main steps: Encoding, receiving the information by the brain through our senses such as ear, eye or skin; storage, the brain stores at a particular site depending on the type of information received; and retrieval, when we have to bring back the stored information at a later date.

Dr Eugene Dordoye, a Psychiatrist  at the Ankaful Psychiatric Hospital in the Central Region, explains that memory can be stored for a short term, for instance following instructions to lock a door on your way out, while learning to drive or read is stored in our long-term memory. Generally, we forget because of encoding failure, decay of the memory trace and/or retrieval failure.

He explains that many memory failures result not from “forgetting” information that we once knew well, but from failing to encode the information into long-term memory in the first place.  He gave as an example the fact that  very few people can draw the one cedi coin from memory with accurate detail. This, he says, is because the details of a coin’s appearance are not meaningful to most of us, so we do not encode them no matter how often we see coins in our daily lives.

Throwing more light on “decay”, he says it  essentially means  that our memories tend to fade with time and that explains why ageing sometimes brings about some memory lapses, though it can also be caused by drugs/medications and many diseases collectively referred to as neurocognitive disorders.

The psychiatrist notes that old age alone should not impair memory to the extent of requiring help with normal activities of daily living.

“If it does, then we may be looking at one of the many causes of dementia, a neurocognitive disorder which tends to be more common among the elderly and a few other conditions that may affect young people,” he explained.  Other situations unrelated to memory per se,  he says,   can make us forget though  we can later recall because they tend to cause impaired concentration and/or attention.

Amnesias and dementias

Dr Dordoye states that generally, forgetfulness can be considered in two folds: Amnesias and Dementias.

Amnesias, he notes,  involves memory loss alone while dementias tend to involve memory loss and other higher brain functions such as executing our plans, poor judgement, poor abstraction etc, and there are many causes of both.

He considered absent-mindedness to be more about loss or impaired concentration other than actual memory problem. So in this case, it is easy for a child who is sent on an errand to fetch a glass of water while watching an interesting programme, to return with the water but hand it over to the wrong person because he is not concentrating.

He notes that emotions are stored close to memory and, therefore, affect each other. For instance, one can almost always recall into very great detail the location, time, dresses etc when given an emotionally devastating piece of news such as divorce, being jilted by a partner or first time of orgasm.

Dr Dordoye says traumatic events can also make us unconsciously repress some memories that we no longer recollect them.

Absent mindedness according to him only presents as if the memory is not there but the truth is that  the memory might not have been formed at all.

Getting into more theory, he says we may consider the three  stages of memory as  registration, encoding and retrieval.

According to him, problems with any of these three  stages cause “forgetfulness” or memory problems.

Unfortunately, Dr Dordoye says  many of these conditions are common in Ghana. Though he did not have statistics on the situation, he said, “They tend to be ignored as part of ageing in Ghana and unfortunately some of the reversible causes of memory losses are left untreated and the manageable ones are allowed to deteriorate quite fast”.

“It is a pity that our society does not recognise it to treat but it surely decreases the quality of life of many elderly people unnecessarily,” he added.

Dr Dordoye  advises that medical help be sought when forgetfulness interferes with  daily living.

Fortunately, Dr Dordoye says  Lucy and Naa Amatsoo do not seem to  need medical attention since they do not forget all the time and their kind of forgetting does not affect their activities of daily living.

Writer’s e-mail: doreen.hammond@graphic.com.gh

Source: graphic.com.gh