useitorloseit

Use it or lose it

by Bob on June 24, 2007

There is an expression, "If you don't use it, you lose it".

That is a very important admonition.

There are some things which we can in fact amazingly remember how to do after years of not having done them. Like how to ride a bicycle. Usually people remember how to ride a bike. But it involves an assortment of physical and mental processes and hand, eye, motor reflexes, etc.

A well-seasoned musician who hasn't played his instrument in a while can usually pick it up and play it quite well in a short while.

Other things don't seem to work that way. Remembering Physics formulas from high school or university if we haven't used them for decades. They just don't come back it seems.

There is one theory that all we ever remember is still in our head and memory but it has a hard time being accessed. We all know about that famous "I have that on the tip of my tongue" syndrome.

Another item in the scientific literature reports that when people get older they remember less from the present immediate moments and more clearly remember paradoxically and surprisingly from the distant past. Someone will remember something that happened ten years ago but not five minutes ago. This is perplexing to researchers.

Another salient point here is the temptation to not listen to, read, intuit, and understand what is being told to us when we actually first get the information.

If we take the time to really listen to what is being said, or read carefully what is written, and process it, then we have a chance of really remembering it for a long time and have relative quick access to it.

But in our modern age, and likely before, we are tempted to just hear or read something and before we give ourselves a chance to comprehend it, we just write it down and file it away. Or record it on tape and never hear it.

Someone can set up a recording device to automatically record his favourite TV show. Unless he watches it from the tape in a timely fashion, it will become full of dust on a wall shelf of 500 tapes of TV shows that he has the potential to watch but never will, since time marches on and more and more shows are coming. That's great for the companies who make recording media.

Another aspect is the simple things we can do. At the end of an in-person conversation with someone else, and we wish to get in touch with them again, the usual ending these modern technological days, bifurcates into (a) "Can you write down your email address for me?", or (b) "Tell me your cell phone number -- here I am opening my cell phone -- and I will put your number in my cell phone and call you".

Okay, great. But there's a "but". I usually ask my friend "Is your email address easy to remember?". If it is relatively easy to remember, I make a conscious effort to remember it there on the spot and not write it down. It then forces me to write an email in a timely fashion before I really forget it. But I have found that once I really try to remember the email address, I can mostly do it, except where it is an unusually hard one to remember, like a series of seemingly random digits.

There is also a challenging technological part of this all. I have heard people, rather than trying to remember someone's cell phone number, say "I can't wait until they make cell phones where I can put mine next to yours and your number will be put automatically into mine!". Yes. But what happens when someone loses his cell phone or the battery dies and there is no mental backup because no one uses numbers anymore -- they just press "Bob" or "Joan" or "Jim" and say dial. Many people when they lose their cell phones they can't call anyone ! They have no idea of people's numbers !

The same is true in a supermarket these days with holographic bar-code product scanning devices. Hardly any checkout clerk knows what the price of anything is anymore. He's been taken out of the equation.

One wonders about memory. If one can even remember to remember or remember what a good functioning memory we all used to have and use everyday, rather than relegate our memories to an electronic device !

So it goes. One recalls also that one of the original three Muses in ancient Greece was Mneme which stood for memory. The other two were Aoide ("song or voice") and Melete ("practice" and "occasion").

Thanks for the memories. So it goes, indeed.