Forgetfulness: Absentmindedness and Confusion

CONFUSION AND ABSENTMINDEDNESS – FORGETFULNESS

(Based on author’s site www.geocities.com/absntm)


Confusion and absentmindedness affect not only the elderly; nor do they occur only in cases of Amnesia or Dementia -Alzheimer's disease ~everyone in daily life suffers to one extent or another, sometimes with significant consequences, from, both, confusion and absentmindedness.

What is 'memory' there have been many scientific, academic, theories about ~even in cases of simplest and least complex brains and nerve systems science has little knowledge and only sketchy understanding of it -theories have varied from 'neural' assuming that changes in the anatomy of the brain take place when something is seen or heard or experienced and learned, to 'electrical' supposing changes in the electrical fields in the brain, to 'biochemical' believing that that causes in the molecular structure of the brain's cells a re-alignment.

How we remember is now accepted by science -the thinkers of millennia ago were right: the human brain contains a number of schemata each schema storing different types of related information (basically, first in limited-capacity sensory registers -often as strings of information, processing some and passing them into short-memory in order to process more, any of significance transferring to long-memory and placing in the appropriate schema with others of same or similar kind). The relevant parts of the stored information, when triggered by an event or intention, are, as memory-trace, result of the change, recalled.

Why confusion and absentmindedness there are two reasons generally agreed upon by psychiatrists and psychologists...

1. Confusion arises ordinarily because memory, unless the focus of the whole thing would be blatantly incorrect, automatically adds to, or subtracts from, what has actually been seen or heard and remembers only as would fit in with the related pre-formed schema -as expected or implied, unconsciously integrated and interpreted ~experiments about possible consequences (e.g. the discovery in 2003 that in the USA in the state of Illinois alone over 50% of convicts executed had been innocent) showed that in an office shown were not remembered a skull, a bark, a rolling pin, it contained -yet were 'remembered' books and a telephone which it did not -a barn not seen but suggested in questioning within 20 minutes by half, a week later by 80% , were 'remembered' as having been seen (in the UK in 2003 the British Psychological Association struck off a government criminal/psychological profiler for manipulating a murder 'confession'). Confusion is caused normally by this natural function of man's memory.

2. Absentmindedness is caused by perfectly natural 'slips of action' ~experiment have shown 35 people in one single week to have made 400 of them (excluding many of insignificance and not recorded) -it is failure to wholly or in part retrieve from, or to keep long enough in, memory actions or the sequence or the goal of actions carried out and/or to be carried out in the existing situation and/or in one or more other situations triggerable by it: the memory mechanism, especially in ordinary routine actions almost inattentively, automatically, performed (and more so if their importance have lessened -indeed by the passing of time itself) tends to switch from specific to schematic, general, retrieval; it is how man's memory is naturally constructed and normally functions.

Diet and Exercise help, some suggest, reduce confusion and absentmindedness -and indeed may be a reason why some are more prone to confusion and absentmindedness than others ~their recommendations being the inclusion in one's diet of roughage (both, the weed called so from health-shops or supermarkets, as well as foods containing fibre such as bran -these as compounds of high molecular weight having in the body electrical potential when interfacing with water), and in a sitting position after deeply inhaling and with one’s back straight bending the body forward for a few seconds while holding the breath -no more than thrice a day and for a maximum of three minutes each time (these [bio]electrically re-charging also the spleen associated with sense organs -visual memory tending directly from the sense organs to be transferred to one's memory).

Confusion and absentmindedness only in 10% of those over 70/80 have the potential to develop into more than ordinary everyday forms of them.

The author has a website at: http://www.geocities.com/eoa_uk