flynn002

Here’s a problem I encountered the other day. I’d left my keys at home (a bad start). But I’ve learned to arrange life to allow for cognitive failures, and I knew there was a spare key in the keybox in my PA’s office. My PA was on holiday, and her door was locked, but I was not foiled by this because there’s a spare key to her room in another keybox (#2) outside her door. Both keyboxes have numeric codes, but codes for the keyboxes have been set to be memorable, even by someone with a barely functioning hippocampus. So I managed to get into my PA’s office, extract key for my office, lock up her office, enter my office, and do a full day’s work. It was going in the other direction, restoring my office key to the keybox, that proved challenging. Before you read on, you might want to give your frontal lobes a little work-out: what should the correct sequence of events be? Well, here’s what I did: 1.    Go down corridor to keybox to retrieve key to PA’s office. Unable to read...

Well, I had not planned a blogpost this morning, but I am goaded to do so by growing frustration as I attempted to read a review that was published in Trends in Neurosciences. The authors were proposing a novel theory in a controversial area, and came out with definitive statements, such as “Imaging studies have revealed the involvement of brain regions including the basal ganglia and cerebellum”. Quite appropriately, they supported such assertions with references. But the journal format meant that these references were identified only by numbers, so I had to flip to the reference list at the back of the paper to find out what was being referred to. The paper had over 70 references, and in the course of reading it, I reckon I did this about 20 times. I would have done it more, but it was distracting and I had to put down my mug of tea each time while I hunted for the relevant page. If I forgot the number on the way (a not unusual occurrence at my age), I had to go through this loop aga...