The kitchen table was already crowded with the Sunday pill organiser and the paper calendar when Carol called from Arizona, her voice tight. She had her reading glasses pushed up into her hair and a supermarket flyer in her hand, she said, but she couldn’t hold onto the phone number for the pharmacy long enough to dial it. She read the ten digits off the flyer, hung up, forgot them, and had to look again. It scared her, she said, in the way things scare you when you’re sixty-four and alone with a quiet house.
Why memory slips after sixtyWatch the video: why memory slips after sixty and how to get it back.
I gave her the same advice I offer to anyone who arrives at the Elm Street senior centre carrying a brown bag. Before we worry about the mind, we look at the company it keeps. Carol had been eating lunch at her desk since the neighbours moved away, then going home to an empty kitchen. She had stopped walking because there was no one to walk with. I asked her to try one thing: find a table where other people were sitting, and sit there. Not a class. Just lunch. It took her three months to work up to it, and another two before she started walking with a woman named Dot who also liked to stop for coffee. The phone number didn’t start sticking overnight, but she stopped being afraid of it, which is its own kind of remembering.
Go watch the full video before you decide this is just what sixty looks like.
The myth is that memory after sixty is a solo project, that you sit alone with your crossword and your lists and your worry, and if you try hard enough you can hold onto everything yourself. What actually happens, from where I stood behind the pharmacy counter for thirty-two years and now at the brown-bag table, is that isolation makes the ordinary kind of forgetting louder. When you have to explain your morning to someone else, when you have to remember that Bev takes her walk at nine and that Dot prefers the corner table, you are using your mind in the way it was built for. Hearing is memory, and so is being heard.
I learned this the long way with Henry Molaison, though I never met him. We all have a hippocampus, and it needs practice. In 1963, George Sperling showed people grids of twelve letters—three rows of four—and found that while we can hold about twelve items in sensory memory, they vanish within a few hundred milliseconds. The information is there, then it’s gone, unless we catch it. That’s what company does. It catches the moment before it fades.
Here is what the numbers look like when you sit down to remember something. Miller, working at Bell Laboratories, found that short-term memory holds seven items, plus or minus two. He called it the magical number. Modern thinking puts it lower, maybe four or five chunks. So when you try to remember a ten-digit telephone number, don’t try to hold all ten digits. Chunk them. Take the area code—say 123—then a three-digit chunk like 456, then four digits like 7890. Three chunks instead of ten loose items. It works because you are giving your mind a shape to hold onto. Conrad found in 1964 that we stumble when letters sound alike—E, P, D—because short-term memory encodes acoustically. Baddeley found in 1966 that long-term memory stores by meaning, so after twenty minutes, we confuse words that mean similar things. This is why I keep a names notebook. What is written down is remembered, and what is said out loud to a friend is remembered better.
A friend wondering how to handle the slip between the number and the dial would hear this from me: go find your people. Not a program. Just a chair at a table where someone expects you. I wrote about finding company after sixty in the context of how we hold onto ourselves, and about walking as a memory habit after sixty, because the body and the mind are not separate rooms. I would tell her that long-term memory is physical—it requires gene transcription and new protein synthesis, and by 2015 we knew that rats with strong new memories change the expression of about 1,000 genes in the hippocampus, increasing some and reducing others, touching 9.17 percent of the genome. Real change happens in the tissue when we engage with the world.
Watch the video now, while the kettle is on, and see what it shows about what is usually behind these slips.
I still keep the blood-pressure cuff in the hall drawer and the brown paper bag ready for medicines to be sorted. I fill the pill organiser on Sunday mornings and I write names in the notebook. Carol calls less often now with that tight voice, but when she does, I wonder: if we know that being together changes the very proteins in the brain, why do we wait until we are lonely to believe it?