Amnesia

Yesterday, I needed to do some very basic calculus for solving a problem at work.  I know it was very basic calculus because when I googled it, the sites that came up were mostly introductory calculus related.  I should have know it was basic stuff because I've taken introductory calculus and advanced calculus and a few classes after that.  I should not have even needed to be googling at all - I did quite well in those classes and this problem should have been child's play.

Instead, I found myself reading material that felt completely foreign and new.  Like some amnesia patient who'd just been introduced to his mother, I was amazed at how little I remembered of something I supposedly once knew so well.  I found it extremely frustrating - learning this stuff was going to take some work and according to my college transcripts I already knew it.  I kept at it, however, hoping that at some point the right synapses would reawaken the part of my brain that hopefully still held this knowledge.  No reawakening so far.

This isn't the first time I've had this experience.  A couple of years ago, we remodeled our house.  As part of the remodel, we needed to tear down our old garage.  This meant we first had to clean out the garage.  It was a small garage but that didn't stop us from accumulating a bunch of junk in it.  I remember sifting through boxes, finding a few items to keep and throwing out the rest.  In the far back corner of the garage there was this old battered box that I'd had been toting around with me for over twenty years.  When I graduated from college, I threw the last of my notebooks and returned exams into this box, along with anything else still in my dorm room.  The box traveled along with me through the various places I lived, never being opened - just stuffed in one storage closet after another.  It was finally time to go through this box. 

The notebooks and exams inside proved that I once did understand higher mathematics.  I remember paging through one exam in particular - my professor had made a flattering comment about a proof I had provided.  The comment was the only thing on the page that I even remotely understood.  Whatever I had done twenty-some years earlier was a mystery to me now.  There were also some graduation cards in the box.  I recognized most of the names on these, but there were a couple that I couldn't place at all.  I threw away just about everything in the box.  It wasn't difficult to throw it all away since it really no longer had any meaning to me.

So, here I sit, relearning something I once knew so well.  I'm still holding out hope that I'll eventually remember some of this or that it will be easier to learn because of my earlier efforts.  A couple of weeks ago, I was listening to a music station that plays songs from the 80s.  The song "867-5309/Jenny" by Tommy Tutone came on and I realized I could easily recall most if not all of the lyrics.  This song came out in 1982, about the time I was learning some of the calculus I needed now.  I don't know why my brain decided to keep one and toss the other.  Right now, I'd gladly trade the lyrics for a little background on derivatives.