Why I have poor memory

I have found a scapegoat for my poor memory. According to researchers in psychology, a person’s working memory consists of several components, all of which may not be located in the same country. No, actually, these components are called a central executive and three “slave systems.”

Which perfectly explains why I so often forget things. My slaves are disobeying the central executive!

"Working memory" is the new term for what we used to call short-term memory. "Working memory" is an oxymoron for me, as my memory works about as often as it doesn't. But the new term is shorter and therefore easier to remember, and that way it puts less stress on the central executive, which has a hard enough time trying to corral those three slaves and get some decent work out of them.

Now where was I? Oh, yes.

Each slave supposedly has its own area to take care of. One rehearses verbal information in a continual loop, for instance when you are at the grocery store and you were too proud of your memory to write down what you needed to get, so you keep repeating your list of items to yourself: "Bananas, lunchmeat, milk...bananas, lunchmeat, milk...bananas...." Another slave is supposed to help you with visual or spatial tasks, like remembering the color and make of the car that just hit yours in the parking lot or judging how fast another grocery cart aiming toward the meat counter is moving and whether you can make it there faster. This slave system also plans spatial movements. In my brain, this slave frequently disobeys orders. For instance, say my body heads toward the kitchen for a snack. The central executive will order this slave to remember that the body is heading toward a healthy snack, say, carrots, but the slave will reinterpret this and whisper something else entirely to the body -- say, a brownie. And of course, the body, which has no short-term/working memory of its own, moves toward the last thing ordered. So you can see how insidious these slave systems can be.

The third slave system, which was "discovered" much more recently than the first two -- which makes you wonder how much work it really does if no one knew it was there -- supposedly coordinates the functioning of the other two. This is beginning to sound like a junior manager to me. It also takes care of chronological ordering, like helping you remember to put the soup in the pan AFTER you open the can.

And the poor central executive is left with the task of making sure everyone else performs their tasks, and it is also supposed to make sure the slaves pay attention to important information and forget irrelevant information. Clearly this process has broken down somewhere along the line in my own brain. I remember the birthdays of people I went to elementary school with -- which means this information passed the slave gatekeepers and entered my long-term memory a long time ago -- but I cannot remember my point here, or how I was going to end this article. Maybe I'll go have some carrots.