Memory issues? Or just a new way of learning?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about learning; especially how difficult it has been for me to learn the Hawaiian language (with help from Duolingo) because I find myself going over the same vocabulary and grammar again and again, and finding new word meanings aren’t sticking as quickly as I’d like.

Realistically, my recognition has always been better than my recall, as it is for lots of people. Even so, it just seems to take me longer to learn something these days — to truly know a word or concept, and have confidence that it’s securely logged away somewhere in my brain, where it can be readily and reliably retrieved.

For a while I was concerned this might be related to the dreaded “memory issues” that can crop up at my age, but the more I think about it, the more I don’t believe my mind is slipping.  When I’m being honest with myself, I have to admit I’ve always found it difficult to memorize anything.  Take music, for example — when I was learning to play piano, I found I could sight-read very well, which actually made memorizing harder because I got used to simply reading through the music each time, and then I was mentally done with it, and hadn’t memorize a note.

There are other examples — I’m reminded of my embarrassingly abysmal performances trying to recite lines from plays and monologues in that one high school speech course I took.  And I also tell the story of looking for and finding a document online at work that explained in detail a particular business concept that I wanted to cite, and when I checked to see who wrote that document, I discovered it was me. I had not only brain-fogged some of the exact details of that business concept, but I’d forgotten that I’d written it down so I wouldn’t forget!

That’s simply how my brain works — much stronger at the macro than micro; better at grasping broad concepts, discerning complex patterns, and other mental abilities that don’t necessarily rely on specific, detailed memorization and retrieval.  That’s just me.

These days, I’m coming to accept that for me, memorization is getting even more difficult. However, instead of senility, I suspect at least part of the reason is because there’s a lot more data stuffed into my brain than when I was younger.  It seems that each new memory competes for the same dwindling available space, and sometimes it takes more repetitions to get those memories dug deep enough so that they don’t get immediately overwritten by some other trivia, and so that I can find them again later.

As I like to describe it, when I was younger, learning was more like writing on paper. One pass, and it was recorded for good. These days, it’s more like carving words into wooden — or even stone — blocks that are stored on some memory shelf. One quick scratch isn’t enough for a new fact to sink in. I have to go over the words at least a few times, and often I need to dig that chisel a bit deeper and make the cuts a bit wider before I can feel confident that I’ll be able to spot that bit of info from a distance, and retrieve it off the shelf.

Ultimately, it’s also about self awareness; becoming more conscious in each moment of my mood, what’s going on in my mind and body, and deliberately taking a more active role in those processes — including the process of creating memories. This also becomes an opportunity to appreciate those memories we already cherish, and to carefully and deliberately choose which new memories we want to add to that collection.

So perhaps these little memory challenges aren’t such a bad thing after all? Ask me again later. And see if I can remember…