Just remember to laugh

Being the kind of person who has a mind full of mince, my ability to recall trivia and to be able to access a groaning, dust-laden internal library of useless information is, I would venture to boast, second to none.

I am an asset to any pub quiz team, as long as they don’t ask me anything about science or sport. And even then, there are some arcane areas of botany, the chemical elements (thanks to satirist Tom Lehrer rather than a close acquaintance with the periodic table) and Scottish football prior to 1978 that might come crawling out of the brainshaped woodwork to bludgeon any unsuspecting opponents into submission and carry off the major prize of something irresistible, like a litre bottle of warm Liebfraumilch.

But now, it would appear, this kind of filing system for random neurons is actually more of a hindrance than a help. Counter-intuitively and contrary to anything that those of us of a certain generation (who had to learn spelling lists, lengthy Victorian poems and all the times tables up to 12 off by heart) were taught back in the day, memory loss is actually rather a good thing.

Not, of course, in the serious cases linked to the horrors of dementia. But in general, it is being claimed that bursts of forgetfulness are actually good for thought and decision-making processes because it is the human brain’s way of weeding out stuff we don’t really need.

It’s like a kind of cranial wardrobe de-cluttering, shunning those out-ofdate ‘70s platforms of thought, spurning the past-it ra-ra skirts of wisdom, turning your face resolutely again the bell-bottoms of mistaken belief and the safety-pinned bondage breeks of times gone by.

Not being able to remember your friends’ (or children’s) names, directions to important places like hospitals or where you work, or where you left your car keys (or in extreme cases, your car) is actually OK because forgetting wodges of information, far from being a failure of our intellectual retrieval system, is actually the perfect way of filtering out the kind of intrusive and allegedly irrelevant fluff that gets in the way of the bigger picture. In the words of the immortal song from Frozen, Let It Go! And don’t we all wish we could do that with that particularly irritating and all-pervasive ear-worm…

Now, I can see the thinking behind all of this but as a walking refuse collection of fusty facts and figures acquired over six decades, I would just like to point out that it could be argued that to forget something, you had to know it in the first place. And that it might just be useful to be able to recognise and make a value judgement about its worth before consigning it to the dustbin of the hippocampus. Just saying.

It’s kind of a new take on “don’t sweat the small stuff”, where we don’t have to feel guilty about not recalling every little detail of life to date because our bigger human attention level should instead be on filtering out the human Hoover bag of past detritus in favour of focusing on making good decisions now and in the future. Would that someone had posited this persuasive theory to the likes of Theresa May and Donald Trump long before now, I find myself thinking out loud; although maybe selective memory loss is a skill that comes built into the psyche of anyone who wishes to “succeed” in politics, especially when it comes to manifesto promises and campaign claims.

I would have told you all this some weeks ago, of course, when I first read, marked, learned and inwardly digested the information which I intended to plagiarise happily and shamelessly from its original source. Except, of course, that it completely slipped my mind…

Unlike what I also read recently about the existence of what are known as “laughter clubs”. These appear to be places where people get together to have a chat and tell each other amusing, not to say rollicking, anecdotes designed to release all those happiness-inducing endorphins and give everyone a jolly good giggle. It’s all meant to make them feel better about themselves, life, the universe and everything. Or, as normal people call it, going down the pub.

It’s an aspect of modern “lifestyle” obsession, that we seem hell-bent on adding another layer of complication to living, creating something allegedly “new” out of what was already there and, for the most part, working quite successfully, thank you very much.

Mind you, as someone who perhaps frequents the pub a little too much, you know you’re out of the swim of popular culture when you see an article about “The 10 Best Bourbons” and instead of deciding that next time you are down the local “laughter club”, you must try one of those, you find yourself thinking, in a very middle-aged, British kind of way: “Hmmm. I didn’t know there were so many different versions of that popular, classic biscuit”…

It’s an aspect of modern ‘lifestyle’ obsession...

Laughter clubs? The pub works just fine, thank you.