A long-time friend of mine gave me a great line about our memory lapses as we get older. He said:
It’s not a ‘loss of memory’ problem, it’s a ‘memory retrieval’ problem. A ‘lost’ memory is really not lost at all; it’s there, but the retrieval system doesn’t work so well sometimes, in our ‘sunset’ years.
His idea seems to make scientific sense, as this report claims, in as much as certain enzymes can help ‘restore’ memories. And, even without the aid of science, we ourselves sometimes find a ‘lost’ memory - sometimes even very unexpectedly and sometimes out of context of anything we are doing at the moment.
They had to still be there, and not missing at all, in order to be ‘found’ again.
We should learn to start referring to this whole issue as the issue of “misplaced” memories.
My grandfather, who died in the early 1970’s, had Alzheimer’s.
He would ‘remember’ stuff from his youth and talk about going to visit someone who had been dead for years.............
It’s like a lousy filing system. What made sense to you when an event happened may not be obvious to you when you need to recall the event.