Awkward Memory Outages

Recently, a good friend was explaining to me how acutely stricken he was when he suddenly blanked out on the name of the wife of his closest friend and neighbour for fifteen years.  The fact that my friend turned beet-red in the face even as he was describing this to me a few months later, told me something should have been seriously out of kilter with him.  The neighbour had come asking my friend, who was trying to fix something in his car, where Sunita was.  Half concentrating on what he was doing, my friend turned and looked at the neighbour blankly, not comprehending why he was being asked the question, since he just did not `recognize' the name in that context.  He must have been gaping pretty stupidly for the neighbour to repeat the question irritably before moving away in his quest of a more responsive audience! For the next half an hour the witless man had ignored his car and struggled to retrieve that single nugget from his memory bank - who was Sunita and why was he being questioned about her?  Since the thorough internal search did not yield any dividend, he had to seek enlightenment from known external founts of knowledge; without losing time he turned to the one he had close at home. He explained the context to his own wife and asked her, knowing vaguely that he was well on the way to making an ass of himself and providing fodder to his wife for the next millennium to tease him. When his wife gave him that especially odd look (which translated into `why are you being more of a mutt today than usual'?) and exclaimed that the neighbour was indeed looking for his spouse, my friend soundlessly dissolved into a heap of embarrassment.  Deservedly so.  And he avoided crossing the path of his neighbour or his wife for the next few weeks (he would  have gladly avoided his own wife too, if he knew how), until he was certain  they had forgotten the rather humiliating affair.  His wife, however, ruthlessly and unabashedly uses that episode as an `asthra' to ensure that the friend maintains the desired degree of malleability and ductility at all times.

You say this happens to everyone?  Probably.  I see brain's memory bank as a whole lot of pigeon holes into which things are archived.  And the holes are all brightly lit, so that one can identify the contents during searches.  What happens when there is a momentary power outage, impeding retrieval of the desired information at a given moment?  Well, one struggles and turns beet-red, as my friend did.  One does not have to be with one leg in the grave or within striking distance of amnesia or Alzheimers to fall a victim to this pestilence.  This happens to healthy people in their prime routinely, so nothing to worry about except the immediate discomfiture.  There may be a thousand unconvincing explanations as to why this happens, but that is neither here nor there.

The other day, I woke up in the morning with a bee in my bonnet, as it were.  There was an intrusive buzz, which I could not banish despite concerted efforts.  I ignored the distraction for a while, but during breakfast it dawned on me that the buzz was actually the tune of a Thamizh film song.  With some unifocal effort, I could decipher the contours of the tune but my success trailed off beyond that. I could not identify or recall anything else - not the lyrics, not the singer, not the movie, nothing else.  I went about my chores for half a day, (which included two seemingly important conference calls on earth-shaking subjects like Liquidity Risk, Capital Adequacy, Governance issues) like someone who had a distinctly alien substance stuck in his throat, neither to be swallowed nor to be spat out.  All the while, this intriguing tune was playing in my mind as if in a loop.  When someone was expressing a serious concern about the extant asset liability mismatch and liquidity problems , I was screwing up my face in agony, trying to remember at least a few words from the lyrics of the song, so that full identification became possible by googling.  Another participant in the call, seeing me overwrought, thought that I was being uncharacteristically and needlessly emotional about mundane corporate matters and wanted to pacify me, offering me a glass of cold water.  Lunch and tea came and went without any improvement in the situation and I was getting increasingly agitated by my failure to put the finger on the nub.  I shed all inhibition about my singing ability or the acute lack of it and actually hummed the tune over phone to a friend, who revels in Thamizh film songs.  Unfortunately, to him, my off-key humming sounded like twelve different songs and when I rejected all his suggestions,  he angrily retorted that I ought to provide a more decent clue.  My glum look during dinner prompted my worried wife to ask what was wrong. Unfortunately she was no pundit with Thamizh film songs, so I did not see even a remote chance of her solving the puzzle for me.  A little after 2 a.m next day, when I got up for water, just one sleepy sip proved so potent that I attained `realisation' - the song came to me in a flash.  `Vannam Konda Vennilave' from Sigaram, a 1991 movie.  I hastened to listen to the song on Youtube a couple of times and with a sense of elation, went back to sleep.  What I wonder about is why and how did that particular song worm into my consciousness like a `canker in the bud' as the bard put it and why the resolution finally appeared on the horizon at that specific juncture.  I will never find out, I guess.

The other phenomenon that always puzzles me is that one can vividly remember inane things from one's childhood (events like the wild fisticuffs after a not-so-neutral umpire sheepishly made a ridiculously late no-ball call off the last ball of the match, to artificially `set-up' victory for one team just to hurt his `enemy' who was the captain of the other team) whereas much more recent events and people involved therein have already been consigned to oblivion by the memory.  How do you explain the fact that I can recall the seating arrangement in my VI class from about 50 years ago, can reel off the names of all classmates while ticking off their faces in my memory, but when accosted by a colleague of recent vintage, I had to awkwardly wait for him to re-introduce himself so that I got his name.  It cannot be because we have lived with childhood memories longer - not all are rehashed frequently in later life.  Is it because childhood memories are far more pleasant for most of us and are therefore entrenched well for retrieval at will??

 May be the answer lies in what my senior colleague proved once with evidence.  He had bustled into the room and asked a bunch of us if we remembered what the bank's revenue numbers were in the year 1981-82 (this was in 1985) and most of us just shrugged him off instantly.  Who was interested in remembering a three-year-old statistic from the bank's performance, now that the bonus has been digested?  This senior colleague then recalled not only that but various other related numbers, much to our amusement.  A few days later, he again barged in and innocently asked a couple of us `do you know which two batsmen were at the crease when Wesley Hall began the last over in the tied test of 1960 between Australia and West Indies?'.  At least three people had the correct answer (Grout and Benaud).  The senior colleague cackled and pointed out that we could not remember revenue numbers from 3 years back , but the other vignette came back to us after 25 years.  His theory was that people remembered what they `wanted' to remember.  Is that it?  May be, but then, strangely even when you maniacally want to recall something, that something eludes you like a veritable eel.

You know what is funny about this whole post?  I have been chewing the cud on this for quite a bit of time and even had a title ready.  It is a phrase used to signify something that is nagging and elusive, remains stubbornly nebulous and perseveres in being unresolved - an answer you know but cannot just put your arms around.  The problem is I have got hit by `memory outage', cannot seem to recollect what that phrase is and have had to resort to a lesser alternative.  It is not one of those run-of-the-mill phrases but something very catchy, used rather selectively but has deserted me completely.   I have asked a few people but they just look at me as if I have grown horns overnight.  It is a pity I cannot give any other clue, because I have no idea.  Can you help??