What's So Memorable About Memory?

What's So Memorable About Memory

About ten years ago, a film called 50 First Dates was released, starring (if I recall correctly) Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore,  Drew Barrymore portrayed a young woman with almost total short term memory loss.  Once you watch the movie (Spoiler Alert!) you learn that she indeed has regained some recall with Adam Sandler's help.  Almost everyone I know over the age of fifty begins to wonder whether or not they have short-term memory loss; from having difficulty recalling just the right word, to someone's name to events that happened any time in the last month.  I have it on and off these days, from trying to remember why I walked into this room, to forgetting a lot of other stuff like...well, you know what I mean.

Anyway, I have wondered whether there can be any correlation between being prone to short-term memory loss and regularly memorizing things.  In other words, does regular use of the skill of memorization prevent short term memory loss (or, conversely, improve short-term memory)?  I have a boyhood pal who grew up to be a nationally-recognized racetrack announcer (Tom Durkin, the recently retired track announcer for the New York Racing Association (Belmont Park, Saratoga Springs), who also called racing's Triple Crown races for ten years or so.  Every day, Tom had to memorize the names of ten races worth of horses, jockeys and the color of the silks they are wearing.  On the occasion of his retirement, we paid him a visit and found he also had excellent recall of events in our grade school and high school years, far better than the rest of us.  While that is still not "short-term memory," it made me wonder--did regular use of his memory at work cause his memory to be better than most?

Which brings me to today.  I have, over the past two years, taken a serious interest in poetry.  I have tried to write it on my own, read books about writing poetry and read all sorts of poetry.  I continue to  pursue the subject (nervy, in the face of my serious lack of talent for it) because I enjoy it.  At some point, the two ideas to which I have been giving a lot of thought, crisscrossed and probably caused a short circuit.  I decided to see what impact memorization might have on short-term memory.  I decided to start memorizing poetry on a regular basis.  I plan to memorize fifty of the one hundred poems I have in an anthology I picked up.  Today's poem is Shakespeare's Sonnet XVIII.  You know, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"  I'm a little rusty, so I don't expect to do it quickly, but... .if I can just remember where that book is....