“I think I’m getting Alzheimer’s” my mother said, peeling potatoes at the pass-through window in her tiny kitchen. I was startled, but asked her why she thought so.
“Because I forget things,” she said. I smiled.
“You’ve been doing that since I was five,” I told her. Which was true: my mother could never remember which one of her children had performed some misdeed, and would sputter and spit through the five names, hoping that the miscreant would confess when he heard his name. My brother and I would usually offer up the baby sister, sliding her forward like a chess piece, a pawn to be sacrificed to our punishment.
In a later conversation with a friend carrying the same decades I do, I groused about memory lapses that left me wondering what I’d come into a room to do. I said that the frustrating thing was that I would have to leave the room to remember why I’d entered it in the first place.
“I do the same thing,” she said. “It’s because we’re old.” But, according to a study from the University of Notre Dame, crossing the threshold of a door was an “event boundary,” and I left a chunk of my memory in the other room.
The study, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, was the summation of three experiments that psychology professor Gabriel Radvansky conducted, using — note this — college students. Radvansky had his subjects perform memory tasks while crossing a room and while exiting a doorway. The study found that crossing a room did not have the same deleterious effect as walking the same distance and entering another room. In an interview with Notre Dame News, Radvansky said that “entering or exiting … a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ that separates episodes of activity and files them away.” When we sit down in a room and plan a trip to the grocery store and the items we want to get, our brains apparently create file folders to hold the information. When we cross into another room, we flip the shopping list into the folder and prepare another folder for events in the next room.
The report on the study did not say that age was a factor in memory difficulties resulting from crossing those boundaries, but I took some solace from the fact that “college students” — which I read to mean “young” — had some measure of memory retention difficulty when a doorway was crossed. A long time ago I had read somewhere that writing down what we’ve heard is a way to process it into our long-term memory, thereby making it easier to be retrieved. I started doing that when I detected that little chunks had broken off and floated away from the main iceberg of my memories. I kid myself that I “have a problem with names,” and keep a notebook in which I write the names of new acquaintances, along with a description of where we met. And even though I love the physical act of dragging a pen or pencil across a piece of paper, I have also graduated to “poking” pertinent information into my smartphone.
My mother died with all of her mental faculties intact, even offloading some memories that cleared some of the fog that had surrounded her life. She never knew –– academically, anyway –– about the “event boundary.” My knowledge of it, however, does nothing to help my memory. Which is why the laptop on which this column is being written comes with me when I enter the next room.
And I only have a little problem remembering in which folder I filed the draft …