It Takes a Village ... To Finish a Sentence

My Sunday exercise group of older women friends walks together in pleasant weather, engages in pool aerobics when it's hot, and always hangs around afterward to visit. Invariably, we broach some topic that everyone knows about but often no one can immediately recall all the details.

What happens then is that we all chime in with hints and clues we each remember until, finally, like putting together a puzzle, we reach the answer. Who was the leading man in "Psycho"? (Anthony Perkins.) What was the name of the man with the fix-everything shop on Perkins Road? (Mr. Garbush.) What year did Louisiana last have a constitutional convention? (1974.)

Often, however, at least one of us succumbs to the temptation to pull out her cellphone to Google the answer; it's a phenomenon as common among our vintage as among the young people and I've begun to think of this dependence as contributing to my own weakness, which I call Google Brain. I think my automatic reliance on digital sources to furnish information instead of wrenching my memory bank to pull it out has created a problem. 

My recall has gone to pot.

The ability to recall information from memory is scientifically referred to as memory retrieval or ecphory. I knew mine had diminished but this was emphatically affirmed when, as one of hundreds of volunteers in a long-running brain study sponsored by the local biomedical research center, I had a consistent problem. 

Each year, I failed in an exercise that required repeating a number of words that had been introduced several exercises earlier; but then, a bit later in the testing, this same collection of words was sprinkled among a more expansive list from which I was asked to identify the known words. In this I was, quite modestly, brilliant. Completely confused by my starkly inconsistent abilities, I finally asked the tester about these results. "Your recognition is high," she said tactfully, "but your recall is much weaker." 

Substituting digital help for making demands on my memory has exacerbated this. I also excused my weak recall to 40-plus years as a freelance writer and nonfiction author whose copious note-taking meant my knowledge of many subjects was penned onto hundreds of notebook pages and transcribed on my computer. If I remembered facts and information from these, it was because I had written them down, then read through them again and again.

Today, we don't have to remember much because, with just the touch of a few key strokes, we can summon the answer to almost any question, producing an almost infinite amount of information.

In the before-days, when we had to remember things, much of it was memorized. I can still spout my childhood home phone numbers: the main number (University 3221) and my grandmother's line, which my brother and I inherited (University 4115). These have not been part of my life since 1968, yet they were imprinted. Today, I do not know any of my three children's phone numbers by heart because my cellphone knows them.

Today, I have a list of passwords to sites that require my individual identification, which I keep in Dropbox that sits on each of different digital machines. I do remember the password to my desktop computer (on which I do most of my work, including this essay) because my fingers have memorized it. But, just in case, the secret word salad is written down on a piece of paper and stashed in a safe place (and I hope I remember where).

Before the days of Google Brain affliction, I could easily sit for a moment to try and recall something I knew I knew. This was not frustrating or concerning; after all, my ever-aging brain was stuffed with decades of accumulated knowledge and data. Moreover, in the before-times, when I wanted to learn something — the length of the Mississippi River, perhaps, I would either consult our encyclopedia or call a reference librarian at the local library. 

Rumor has it that today, in many schools, children have to memorize little — it's too boring, not interactive enough. No arithmetic tables or dates from history. I wonder if common mnemonics have also disappeared, like the one our 10th-grade biology teacher introduced for us to remember taxonomy: King Philip Caught Old Friends Gathering Strawberries for kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species.

Will younger generations build their own internal memory banks? Or do they believe they need to neither remember nor recall because all information is at the touch of a keypad? If so, I would warn them, in this world of climate change, what will happen when the power goes out more often? Or their digital systems are hacked and only information inside their own skulls is retrievable?

My precocious great-nephew, now 20, was asked by his kindergarten teacher if anyone knew what an encyclopedia was. He replied that it was "Google in a book." 

So my self imposed Google diet is because I don't want that for myself, especially after the brain study revealed my weakness. Before my 80th birthday this year, I decided to steadfastly resist the urge to do a digital search whenever I can't think of something. I will simply sit and ponder. And sometimes ponder and ponder. Occasionally, I am delighted when the answer magically pops into my head. I feel like the cartoon characters when the lightbulb comes on over their heads, expressing "idea!"

Often, however, the phrase "it's on the tip of my tongue" applies. (Is this once-common expression in peril since everything is within a tap of your fingers?) So now, when I can't remember the word, the name, the information, after a bit I give up. And, quite miraculously, some hours, or a day, later, the answer often pops into my head. 

I introduced my Google Diet to my Sunday afternoon friends who are amused, and somewhat intrigued. We laugh when we've talked about those familiar subjects that we all know and throw in our bits of memory, eventually devising the answer. 

It takes a village … to finish a sentence. Which is, I suppose, something like the octogenarians' version of Googling.