Tag Archives: Remembering

Is Forgetting as you age a good thing? What is the blackboard effect?

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Forgetting?
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.com

Is Forgetting as you age a good thing? What is the blackboard effect?

By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist, Counselor, and Certified Life Coach.

It’s been common to dismiss the role of forgetting things as simply an unavoidable part of aging. But the more I think about it and read about it, the more I see an important benefit or reason why the ability to forget is a part of the human memory system. Not all forgetting is equal.

I’ve come to call this necessary forgetting the blackboard effect.

If you’re old enough to remember when we wrote on blackboards and later green boards, then you will recall that over time, the chalk built up on the blackboard. Eventually, the layer of chalk became so thick that when you wrote more information on that board, it was unreadable. Someone had to come through and wash those boards clean to allow new information to be written on the board.

Sometimes our brains need to erase old information to make room for the new. As we go through life, we learn the names of people. Later on, we tend to forget many of those early names. If each of us had to go through the entire list of names of everyone from each of our classes as we went through school, it would probably be late in the afternoon before we were able to recall the name of the person we were talking with.

One reason it gets harder for me, and other people in my age range, to learn new information is that it gets harder and harder to forget the old information. I first learned to do rudimentary programming using a RadioShack TRS 80 model 2 with eight-inch floppy diskettes. As I recall, the computer had 64 K of memory. We put more capacity into children’s toys that come free and fast-food lunches.

The problem here, however, is that whenever I encounter a problem with my current computer, I have to run through how did we do it when we had floppy diskettes, 8-inch diskettes, and then the five-inch and three-inch diskettes, and eventually the memory devices, flash cards, and expansion drives. When trying to do a new operation, my brain is cluttered with trying to forget all the steps that I’ve had to learn to do this operation on previous units with different hardware and software.

Forgetting may actually be the heart of wisdom.

We used to view older people as the source of wisdom. While the young hunters might remember the weather from last week and where they saw the deer yesterday, the elders remember all those dry years when the deer moved in One Direction towards wetter lands and more food, and how in the wet years they sought out different terrains.

Sometimes I wish I were better at forgetting.

Recently, I did some traveling to visit relatives. Some of it involved driving, and some involved flying. As a result, I had to use several rental cars. Now remember, I’ve been driving for 60 years. Probably more than that, but let’s not tell motor vehicles that part. As a result of all that driving, I’ve used a lot of different models of cars. I found it very difficult to adapt to some of the newer rental cars because they had features I didn’t know how to operate, and the controls I was used to were not located where they needed to be.

Even driving one rental car for a month and getting used to it did not prepare me for turning it in, and a few months later, I drove a different make and model, where the controls operated in another way. Trying to use the GPS and hitting the wrong button, suddenly having a video playing, and your directions disappearing, can be a very frustrating experience.

God, I wish I still had some of those old paper maps.

I find it very hard to navigate using GPS. For at least 50 plus years of my life and hundreds of years before that north was always at the top of the map. I’ve learned enough about the old ways to figure out where North and South, East and West, are by observing where the sun comes up in the morning and sets in the evening.

Suddenly, the GPS lady shows me a map in which, to go north, I have to drive from the top down or even from left to right. It leaves me very disoriented. Younger people are used to just following the arrow and letting the GPS tell them if they’re going in the right direction, but I do not like trying to go West by driving away from the sun in the afternoon.

It is not remembering or forgetting that’s the problem.

As we age, it is important to let go of some of the fine details and learn to look for the general patterns. Let’s leave the fine details for the specialist historians. What is important for functioning as you accumulate more trips around the sun is cognitive flexibility. It’s deciding what things you need to remember and letting all the other fine details go.

Computers and even artificial intelligence are excellent at retrieving facts and sources that have long ago escaped my memory. But for deciding where to go and what to do, and even more importantly, whom to do it with, I need to be able to remember the broad principles I learned about what I like and what is acceptable to me.

I seriously question a lot of contemporary wisdom that tries to see immense patterns out of one incident rather than the long course of history.

My conclusion?

Try to keep exercising your brain by thinking deeply and by thinking for yourself. Let the trivial things go, but remember you decide what is important to you and what little details are trivial. Focus on the positive, and you’ll get more of it. Spending all your time looking for Unhappiness and you will live a life full of disappointment.

Recommended Mental Health Books

David Miller at counselorssoapbox.com is an Amazon Affiliate and may receive a small Commission if you purchase a book or product using the link on this page. Using the link will not increase the cost to you.

Does David Joel Miller see clients for counseling and coaching?

Yes, I do. I can see private pay clients if they live in California, where I am licensed. If you’re interested in information about that, please email me or use the contact me form.

Recently, I began working with a telehealth company called Grow Therapy. If you’d like to make an appointment to work with me, contact them, and they can do the required paperwork and show you my available appointments. The link for making an appointment to talk with me is: David Joel Miller, LMFT, LPCC 

Life coaching clients must be working toward a specific problem-solving goal. Coaching is not appropriate if you have a diagnosable mental health problem. Also, life coaching is not covered by insurance. If you think life coaching for creativity or other life goals might be right for you, contact me directly.

Staying in touch with David Joel Miller.

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Seven David Joel Miller Books are available on Amazon now! And more are on the way.

For more about my books, please visit my Amazon Author Page – David Joel Miller

For information about my work in mental health, substance abuse, and having a happy life, please check out https://counselorssoapbox.com

For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel

What purple glass? Memory and the expert effect.

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By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist & Licensed Counselor.

Old pictures

Memories.
Photo courtesy of Pixabay.

The thing may be right in front of you and still, you can’t see it.

The tale of the collectible purple glass

For a brief period, I dabbled in antiques and collectibles. The goal here was to make some money of buying and selling these things as I traveled about. The truth be told most things sold in antique stores these days are far from old and many are not all that collectible.

From time to time a friend of mine and I would wander through the antique stores and see what they had, what they were charging for things and then hope that we might find things worth buying and reselling.

If you intend to make a buck off an activity it helps to know what you are doing and in retrospect, neither of us knew nearly enough to make anything off the effort but at the time it sounded like a fun thing to do.

Now the part about memory

One day after walking through an antique store we stopped to talk about what we had seen. “Did you see that Fenton glass piece? ” she said. N, I had to admit I had not.

“What did you think of that display of Boyd glass they had?” she asked. Again I had to admit that I had not noticed that either.

I had to admit I didn’t remember seeing either.

The final straw came when she asked about a large piece of Purple art glass. My answer about missing that led to some harsh words and well it was all downhill from there.

I realized I knew nothing about collectible glass and that no matter how many trips through the story we made I failed to remember the glass items I had seen.

The solution to this problem came when I went to the library and checked out a few books on collectible glass. At first, they all looked alike. But the more I read about collectible glass and the more pictures I looked at the more the various types of glass started to make sense.

Later on, I actually bought a book on some glass styles I discovered I liked.

After reading those books I discovered that now that I knew something about some styles of collectible glass I recognized them when I saw them. Knowing what things are, makes them more recognizable, results in remembering a lot more about what you see.

One term for this is “the expert effect.” A writer notices books; a mechanic notices cars and someone in real-estate notices more about homes than the average layperson.

I have no doubt that had I kept up my study of glass I would know a lot more about it. Having not looked at any collectible glass for a long time now, those memories have faded away. We should talk more about keeping memories intact and reviving memories that have faded in the future.

What about the memory stuff?

Now that I have become a counselor I realize how many things people come to counseling to talk about they have never noticed. People can’t tell me what they feel because they have never studied themselves and their feelings enough to be able to identify feelings.

Becoming an expert on yourself.

One reason we have so much difficulty recognizing our problems before they become unmanageable is we have never gotten to be experts on ourselves.

If you want a better memory, become an expert on the thing you are trying to remember and it will be much easier to spot that thing in the first place. Strong first impressions on our brains get held onto longer.

Happiness expert.

Are you an expert on happiness? What part of you and your growth or recovery do you need to become an expert about so it will stay fixed in your memory?

Staying connected with David Joel Miller

Seven David Joel Miller Books are available now!

My newest book is now available. It was my opportunity to try on a new genre. I’ve been working on this book for several years, but now seem like the right time to publish it.

Story Bureau.

Story Bureau is a thrilling Dystopian Post-Apocalyptic adventure in the Surviving the Apocalypse series.

Baldwin struggles to survive life in a post-apocalyptic world where the government controls everything.

As society collapses and his family gets plunged into poverty, Baldwin takes a job in the capital city, working for a government agency called the Story Bureau. He discovers the Story Bureau is not a benign news outlet but a sinister government plot to manipulate society.

Bumps on the Road of Life. Whether you struggle with anxiety, depression, low motivation, or addiction, you can recover. Bumps on the Road of Life is the story of how people get off track and how to get your life out of the ditch.

Dark Family Secrets: Doris wants to get her life back, but small-town prejudice could shatter her dreams.

Casino Robbery Arthur Mitchell escapes the trauma of watching his girlfriend die. But the killers know he’s a witness and want him dead.

Planned Accidents  The second Arthur Mitchell and Plutus mystery.

Letters from the Dead: The third in the Arthur Mitchell mystery series.

What would you do if you found a letter to a detective describing a crime and you knew the writer and detective were dead, and you could be next?

Sasquatch. Three things about us, you should know. One, we have seen the past. Two, we’re trapped there. Three, I don’t know if we’ll ever get back to our own time.

For these and my upcoming books; please visit my Author Page – David Joel Miller

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For videos, see: Counselorssoapbox YouTube Video Channel