The plate theory of forgetting..

Forgetfulness has become an obsession with me of late. I probably have like two things that I can remember and the rest of them just seem to vaporize away! And this seems to get worse with time. Not that I am anywhere near the nadir of my life and ready to kick the bucket anytime soon. But still this forgetfulness seems to become more chronic of late.

This got me thinking about it a little bit. And as always I sought out an expert for enlightenment. Big Bro Google should surely lead me to the expert. So I typed "Forgetfulness" at the Search field. Promptly, with the speed that we have come to expect from Google, I get an ad on the right hand side asking me "Is it Alzheimer's Disease?". O Boy I thought, I really needed this one now! I am sure there are a ton of search results that would serve to illumine me in this matter but I was not in the exact mood for being scared. So, being the inveterate escapist that I was, I went back to the arm chair and started ruminating over recent events in a quest for the solution. The following is the outcome of this.

Computer savvy folks can relate to this analogy that I came up with. The mind is like a stack of plates. Each thought in it is like a plate. You keep piling one plate on top of the other and very soon you start building a huge stack. But since there is only so much space available, the ones at the bottom just "go away" (don't ask me how and where). The ones on top stay in the stack till they also get pushed down to no man's land. So this is all fine. But that still does not explain why I am getting more forgetful now than before. To answer that, the only thing I could think of is that my stack has got smaller for some reason thereby accommodating fewer plates! Or maybe I am having too many items on my plate of late.. or continuing the analogy further.. too many plates in my stack! I suddenly realized that it is neither of these two reasons. It is just that of late I have been bombarded with unrelated things which by their very nature are hard to keep track of.

So for me to remember all the tasks that I have to accomplish, there should be a certain amount of cogency in the tasks that I have at hand. This realization lead me to look up at the root cause of the problem. In this digital age, we are bombarded with all kinds of information - each quite disjoint from the other. In the absence of prioritization, we would be desultorily trying to process myriads of information and as promptly forgetting each of them! Hence selectiveness is a necessary criterion for picking what we want to process. We should apply the correct filters to appropriately filter out the "noise" and process the information that needs to be processed. Else, we will end up gobbling too much of useless information and forgetting the one that is important.

A part of this endeavor is to keep your "stack of plates" as little as possible by applying the correct filters as to what qualifies to enter the stack. Hence in pursuant to this thought process, I started disciplining my life a little bit. The following are some of the things I did:

Keep your email "inbox" minimal. Let it not be overwhelmed with historical information. Keep historical information pigeon holed into appropriate email folders that you can always go back to without cluttering your senses.

Speaking of clutter, keep the office and home more organized by reducing clutter.

Cutting the noise out by reducing useless interactions with people, reading unnecessary books etc.

I would say it did help me out. So the plate theory has gone beyond the realm of tectonics and is actually applicable elsewhere too. That is definitely changing the plate quite a bit !