For several days, I simply could not remember my colleague’s last name. His first is Bob ─ that I knew. But a quick mental run through the alphabet did not reveal even the letter with which his last name begins.

Later, in conversation, when a mutual friend also happened to be searching for my colleague’s name, I suddenly blurted it out. And I did so with complete confidence of having it right.

Almost everybody complains about memory lapses. Worse than forgetting names, we cannot remember where we put our keys, our hats, our notes. Spending time searching for any one of these objects can make us feel acute frustration until we find them.

My favorite anecdote involving such a lapse featured a member of my former religious community whom, for his absent-mindedness, we called “Foggy” MacKinnon. This scholar reportedly drove his automobile from Boston to Detroit for a professional conference, and then took an airplane back home! Sure, the story may be apocryphal but it does communicate the sometimes drastic inconvenience of forgetfulness.

In preparation for giving a workshop on the subject of memory in mid-life, I have been reading a fascinating 2001 book called “The Seven Sins of Memory.” Written by Daniel Schacter, it combines the latest psychological science with a humanistic approach based in daily life and good literature.

What Schacter calls “sins” are the following: transience (forgetting over longer or shorter periods of time), absent-mindedness, blocking (you know the word or fact but it remains out of reach), misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence (you can’t get rid of a certain memory). He sees these defects in memory as the price we pay for the marvelous powers that memory gives us.

In addition, Schacter considers each of these “sins” to have compensating advantages. In general, forgetting preserves us from being overburdened with the recollection of events that we no longer need to remember. Bias, for example, might make us cherish an inflated idea of our own accomplishments, but that condition is far better than underrating our own worth.

If you wish to do better in remembering names or other facts, the way toward improvement goes through what Schacter calls “encoding.” This means that the name is registered in the brain sharply enough that it can be recalled when needed.

My own surprising ability to remember names has come about in part by my practice of first repeating the name aloud when someone is introduced. Then, I have retained the habit of associating the name with something or someone else.

You say your name is Ben Jones. Well, I spent a year living in Wales where just about half of the population seems to be named “Jones.” As for “Ben,” that suggests to me the youngest son in the Hebrew Bible.

Schacter also explains that memories are not like simple records stored in our brain that we pick out of the file ready-made. Instead, they are complicated sets of mental realities with contributions coming from various parts of the brain. And they are not just literally replicas of the events; instead they are larded with emotions, imagination, and other forms of experience.

Researchers can now actually see changes in the brain as people exercise their memory. Various parts of the brain are perceived to register these changes when we engage in certain mental functions. And the brains of women operate somewhat differently from those of men.

How about the effects of aging on memory? Professor Schacter writes: “Aging does not produce an across-the-board decline in all memory functions.” Nor does he hold the conventional view about our memory systems losing brain cells as we age.

This observation comforts me since it takes me considerably longer to do the Sunday crossword puzzle than it used to. Now I might need every day of the week to finish it and even then I may fail to complete the whole puzzle.

Of course, I am painfully aware that not a few of us are afflicted with dementia, the disease that has not yet yielded to research efforts to break through and solve.

Perhaps the best way of dealing with memory issues is to take good care of your brain. This means doing all the things that are good for one’s body overall. Physical exercise, good nutrition, and control of blood pressure certainly count. So do spiritual activities, along with friendships and close family relationships.

Paul Nussbaum, a neuropsychologist based in Pittsburgh, asks how we would like to have a three or four pound computer at our disposal for use during every waking hour. The human brain qualifies, except that it is far better than any computer. In fact, you could say, with some truth, that it is the most complex entity in all of creation.

The next time you forget something, you might want to remember, not how fallible memory is, but rather how awesome is the power by which we can recall past experiences and let them enrich our lives now.

Richard Griffin