I was listening to a neuro-scientist from Harvard speaking about short term memory. He and his fellow neurologists were studying about short term memory loss and what we like to call, "senior moments." I'm certain most of us have experienced walking into a room to get "something," and standing, looking around, and not being able to remember what we wanted or even why we walked into the room, in the first place. Many chalk this up to the brain simply aging. It appears that this is not necessarily the case.
Try to remember back when this happened to you. How many other things were going through your mind, at the time? Was anything else occurring? The point being that, frequently, we aren't really "present" when we think about doing something that, a few seconds later, we can't even remember.
What has happened is that we truly didn't register what we intended to get or do, with our brain. Distractions, of any sort, will cause the brain to not be able to identify and process the activity. In effect, our intention never made it to our brain. Therefore, we didn't "forget" what we wanted because it was never processed, in the first place.
We now know that "multi-tasking" doesn't work...even if we think it does. Our brain is constructed in such a way that it truly processes only one task at a time. We are not fully present when texting, talking on the phone, actively listening to a radio program, trying to discipline the children or trying to read a map, while driving. So, the next time you think about getting something in another room, stop, for just a moment, and intentionally say to yourself what it is that you need to get. When you take off those glasses or keys, take a split second to tell yourself what you are doing and where you are putting those items. I think you'll see a difference. You may be able to decrease or even eliminate those, "senior moments," from your life.
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