Working in Movement

In Search of Lost Time describes a 40-something writer's explorations into an increasing forgetfulness that had begun to bother her. She sought out and wrote about encounters with various medical types, finally ending up obtaining (legally) a prescription for an amphetamine like drug called Adderall. That seemed to help her, although she expresses misgivings about side effects.

What interests me most in this article is the writer's discovery that her forgetfulness might not be a memory problem at all but one related to a change in ability to focus attention:

Dr. Canick suggested that for most middle-aged people, the real issue was not so much declining memory or retention but rather the faltering ability to attend to and process the onslaught of colliding streams of information coming at us all day long. ''It gets experienced as a memory issue,'' he said, ''but in reality, it could be about attention, learning or retrieving information.'' We could blame evolution: our brains, designed to attend to novel stimuli like a tiny sound downstairs in the middle of the night, ignore that which seems old and familiar. A great deal of what we experience every day -- some of it important, some not -- simply fails to be encoded. As we age, our brains slip into ''been there, done that'' mode. ''If it blows by you,'' he said, ''and it doesn't register, you're never going to be able to retrieve it -- because it doesn't exist.''

As in the practice of the Feldenkrais Method, developing awareness or attention can make things stand out. Then you might be able to do something about them. Feldenkrais primarily deals with the domain of movement, but the main idea of learning to notice differences seems to apply here too.

Although the writer explores an early-life episode that may have damaged her brain enough to cause her symptoms later, she touches on the idea of the possible link between living a fast-paced life and scattered focus; too many stimuli to pay attention to, not matter what your ability or desire to attend to them.

While I knew that my expectations for myself were high, and that a pathology could be involved, I also saw that many people in midlife experienced the same sense of perpetual distraction and preoccupation. What had brought us to this point? I wondered. Were we trying too hard to live fast-paced, information-heavy lives, when our brains were naturally slowing down? Our fleeting attention, it seemed to me, might be a protective if ill-timed response -- the brain's way of saying that it had simply had enough.

This is a well-written (and entertaining) piece about a subject troubling more and more of us. But I wonder if exploring some learning-based approaches to dealing with the issue might not have made it a bit more complete.

(Via NYT > Magazine.)