I clearly suffer from this.
And I have heard similar thoughts from some friends.
About forgetting names and sometimes forgetting words.
Struggling on them, and suddenly, they come back. Ahh… eureka!
Like how a typical Windows machine, sometimes takes a little time to fetch a file, sometimes slows down..
And we are recommended that we need to de-frag the hard disk, and maybe, things will be fine again…
Do I need to de-frag the disk in my head too? 🙂
Well, the situation is not much different.
All of a sudden, we are seriously stretched for things to remember. The number of individual points or references that get into our heads has multiplied many fold.
Take for instance, the number of people we “know”.
In traditional times (and I am talking no more than 10 years back), we had a few of our school and childhood friends, some college friends, neighbours, relatives, in-laws, and perhaps, we belonged to 1-2 clubs or gyms and knew people there.
And now???
Hundreds or thousands of additional ‘connections’ / ‘fans’ / ‘followers’.. ! You know what I refer to, right?!
How often have I been greeted at events by smiles and handshakes with “thankfully, you look like your DP on Twitter – so I could recognize you”, or “We connected on Linkedn, remember?”
Heck, I DON’T. Remember!!
I just have a few thousand connections on LinkedIn, and a few thousand followers on Twitter or few hundreds of people I met and shook hands with, at various events.
No, I am NOT trying to make myself look busy and important. At all!
I am saying, this is life. And if the person opposite to me feels I should remember him because we connected on LinkedIn, it is only a matter of time, when HIS LinkedIn connections go to a large level as well, that he will realize why I didn’t remember him today.. !
And besides people, think about the things that we need to remember today.
Earlier, you forgot what they taught you in school, when you went to college. And then when you went to work, you could forget your college stuff. It was enough to remember what you were currently involved in. And read the papers for a bit of this-and-that on current events. Could safely take you through an evening party, in terms of conversation pieces.
And suddenly, the world has expanded in terms of the bits and pieces of information that people talk about. At parties. Not just in R&D labs!!
Cloud computing, Quora, Android, Wikileaks, Kanimozi, KG basin, derivatives, Miss India, Get Idea, leopards and Mukesh Ambani, the Land Rover, Kate’s dress at the royal wedding, nano tech, Warren Buffet, China, tsunami, etc. etc. etc. etc.
And words.. new words thrown at you everyday. So Wikileaks is a common noun now? What about Radiagate? And those twitter / SMS short forms. You are supposed to know what FTW means, and that WTF is not just a Welcome to Facebook 🙂
Can my head cope with all this??
Hey you medical types? Have you come up with a concept of de-fragmentation of the head, just yet? I might be interested..
Random Musings 