You go downstairs to retrieve something, and, arriving flummoxed, completely forget why you went. This happens a lot with age, frustratingly, along with forgetting someone’s name, who gave you that birthday tie or who wrote The Leviathan. As a historian, your profession involves remembering certain detailed facts. As a cognitive neuroscientist, mine is too. Yet we’re both forced to use organs that can’t remember for 30 seconds that what we actually needed from the basement was toilet paper. How can our aging bodies work with such consistently unreliable recording instruments?
Truth is, they can’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment