The Lost-and-Found Problem

Although my incredibly mild, clinically undiagnosable, and relatively insignificant memory deficiency doesn't quite match up to the anterograde amnesia our protagonist Leonard Shelby from Memento has (maybe my "condition" will end up in DSM-6 or something anyway), it's certainly been annoying in everyday life. I rely on sticky notes of different colors, different sizes, and different shapes to keep track of what I tend to forget. One stack of sticky note pads lies directly on my desk, another sits in my desk drawer, and another lives in the Notes apps that I've learned to love. There's one major problem though: I'm not always sure what my half-asleep brain means when it scribbles a couple of illegible lines or how ungrammatical fragments are supposed to be translated into coherent ideas. It's what I call the lost-and-found problem.

When I was nine (or somewhere around there - again, my memory's not the best), I forgot my swim bag at practice, more concerned with talking with my friends and heading home to eat dinner. Of course, I later reasoned, it was fine because I would simply go to the lost-and-found to retrieve my bag the next day. I was able to find my bag, but unsurprisingly, almost everything inside had been stolen. Thus, even though lost-and-found systems can (sometimes) preserve lost items from being truly lost forever, the items found are not always in perfect shape. Similarly, even though my notes system usually prevent memory of important items from completely slipping away, full details can be corrupted, leaving me scrambling for the information. I've come up with better techniques, such as forcing myself to be more detailed, but it's still far from perfect.

In Memento, Leonard's condition bars him from the recollection of events from a few minutes prior, and Nolan simulates this experience for the viewer through the movie's unorthodox chronology. We feel displaced and uneasy, but we begin to settle into our surroundings as the scene moves along, just as Leonard relearns his own surroundings as he looks at the physical notes he's left on his body and words scribbled on Polaroids. Leonard's own system, which happens to be a little more deliberate and a little more important than mine, also suffers from the lost-and-found problem. With limited context and details, actual ideas and thoughts can be lost, forming an incomplete picture of the necessary information. Dodd has something to do with Natalie, but we can't be sure of the relationship or the importance of a relationship. 

There's no good cure out there for the lost-and-found problem. Humans are incredibly imperfect beings, and memory is no exception, even if it's far better than most other organisms on this planet. But even if we'll never recover lost memories or retain one-hundred percent of our current ones, we still continue to do memory puzzles and desperately learn new systems for remembering items to capture fleeting information. Imperfection is inevitable, but it's how we deal with it that matters.