Complex Numbers

Born to Forget

My memory is like a steel sieve.

     Forgetfulness: Why your mind going blank can be a benefit  
We've all had those frustrating moments when we struggle to recall someone's name, or a key bit of information stays for too long on the tip of your tongue. It turns out these momentary lapses may actually be good for your memory.

I'm especially bad with names. This is one reason I don't get out much; people tend to think that I don't care enough to remember their names, but the fact is no matter how much I care, names just don't stick in my head.

But it happens to most people, to some degree, and with different things.

On 25 February 1988, at a performance in Worcester, Massachusetts, Bruce Springsteen forgot the opening lines to his all-time greatest hit, Born to Run.

One of many bits of trivia I do have etched into my brain is that Springsteen's birthday was September 23, 1949. That means he was 38 when he had his onstage brain fart. Hardly an age when forgetfulness becomes a problem for most people... unless it happens in public with a song you wrote 15 years (another bit of trivia seared into my skull) earlier and performed thousands of times since.

According to the conventional wisdom about the nature of forgetting, set down in the decades straddling the turn of 20th Century, this simply should not have happened. Forgetting seems like the inevitable consequence of entropy: where memory formation represents a sort of order in our brains that inevitably turns to disorder.

Funny thing about entropy: even memorizing something increases entropy.

Given enough time, cliffs crumble into the sea, new cars fall to pieces, blue jeans fade. As Springsteen put it in his song Atlantic City: "Everything dies, baby, that's a fact." Why should the information in our minds be any different?

1982.

That's when Atlantic City was released on the album Nebraska (look, music doesn't have to make geographical sense). I know I've linked the song in this blog before.

Want me to remember something? Make it a joke, or relate it to music. Especially Springsteen music. Yes, one of the reasons I saved this article was because of the Bruce hook.

In such a model, the preservation of information like song lyrics requires constant upkeep – which, in the case of Born to Run, no one could accuse Springsteen of neglecting. By 1988, he had certainly repeated the lyrics to his 1975 hit thousands of times over.

Yeah, sure, hit in '75, but work on the album started in '74 and that song, he wrote in '73 and early versions got played before the album came out. Hence, the 15 years I quoted above.

And so when he found himself staring out at the expectant Worcester audience at a loss, there was little he could do but confess into the microphone: "Sung it so damn much I forgot what the words were."

At this point, if you haven't looked it up already, you might be racking your brain to remember what the first line is, yourself. I'll save you the trouble: "In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream."

Anyway, there's a lot more to the article, though it doesn't lend itself well to cherry-picking quotes. Worth a read if you want to know where the current science of memory stands, especially how forgetting could actually be an integral part of memorization. Reading it, it seemed to me that the mind works analogously to a muscle: to strengthen a muscle, you don't just keep doing reps, but give it some downtime between weight-lifting sessions to heal.

The brain is, of course, not actually a muscle; I'm just saying the analogy struck me as useful.

One final note: the theory of spaced repetition mentioned in the article as a way to keep stuff in your head? That's apparently what Duolingo is based on. Despite my advanced age and decrepitude, a lot of the language learning actually sticks with me, but the road to memorization can be bumpy and twisty. I cannot forget the French word for seal (the animal), for instance, because I can make a pun about it in English, whereas the word for orchard, to cite just one example, often eludes me because I can't relate it to anything else.

It's still not clear to me how I'd be able to tell the difference between my usual forgetfulness and a Real Problem such as my parents had in their old age. Nor am I convinced that just exercising the brain to learn languages or solve puzzles can really stave off such problems. But that's no reason not to try; there are other benefits, not the least of which being bragging rights.

I'm just glad I'm not in a position to publicly flub my masterpiece.