Leaving home for work in the mornings, I found I was occasionally leaving something behind. My train pass. My ID badge. My keys, sunglasses, phone, wallet. So I made a list on my phone which I check every now and then — not every day, mind you, but on those days when I have that nagging feeling I must be forgetting something.

The other day, I didn’t even think about my list, and as a result left my pills behind (antacids, if you’re curious). Though I am getting well into middle age, I have a good excuse for that particular lapse. I fell down the day before and experienced a minor concussion, which in addition to giving me a headache, left me a little mentally fuzzy all week, and fascinated by it all, as well. The more I thought about what I was forgetting, the more I realized it was like forgetting the list, not the things on the list.

For instance, as I was about to leave my parked car morning after, it started dinging at me that I had forgotten something. The lights? The wipers? The wipers! I surmised after a few seconds. But it took me about 20 seconds of fussing with various similar looking controls on the shifter and turn signals — the lights, rear wipers, cruise control, etc. — to remember which one worked the wipers. I knew how to work the wipers. I just couldn’t find them.

This area of memory seems similar to that used to recall the usernames and passwords required to log into web sites and systems. The process of entering them is exactly the same, so there’s very little that is unique about each experience to help you remember which ones go where. In fact, the only reliable way I have of remembering them is to use a program the entire purpose of which is simply to store all my web login passwords. And, of course, to protect my passwords, the program requires its own password.

Whatever is comparable in the mind to this kind of memory structure is what got slightly corrupted in my mind this week.

For instance, I was also forgetting where some of my computer files were located. Not how to use them or what they were for, but where they fit into the whole structure of things. I’m fairly organized, but this week, that organizational structure was kind of hazy, as if some of the landmarks I normally steer by had disappeared. I had to re-familiarize myself with the landscape of the computer, the file structures before I could get a firm handle on where everything was.

My mother had Alzheimer’s, and from what I remember about her behavior and what I experienced this week, my sense is that when memory goes it must be like being completely side-tracked, falling off the map altogether, losing your landmarks, your list of lists. I remember the way she dwelled in the past, all of time shifting backwards for her because there was nothing she could mentally grab hold of to haul her back to the present.

One wonders how much more our modern day memories are taxed than were those of our forebears. All the little procedures we have to remember, the recipes, step-by-step actions, the mental trails that increasingly criss-cross and jumble together like so many computer wires.

There seems to be no limit to how much memory we as a culture need access to. An article this week in the New York Times Magazine, “Data Center Overload,” discusses the huge server farms that are growing up in hangar-sized buildings all over the country to house all our daily interactions on Facebook, Twitter, Google, Gmail and Xbox, not to mention all the online stores and systems we use to remember what we buy, where to send it, and how to pay for it. It’s clear that our demand for new ways to remember stuff has become insatiable.

So what would you call it if a site like Facebook or Google or Gmail were to go down? Wouldn’t it be just like a concussion to the Internet? A blow that renders all of us as fuzzy-headed as I was last week, knocking out one of those lists of lists? If you couldn’t get at that email address, at that calendar item, at that bit of data that connected A to B and made them make sense, wouldn’t it be the same as I experienced, just on a slightly more global basis?

And what if those sites were all to go down, a sort of worldwide digital dementia, a massive attack of Alzheimer’s of the Internet? To those of you who have known Alzheimer’s victims, wouldn’t the crashing of the Internet be a little like rendering us all as similarly lost, like so many disconnected zombies in a horror movie, so many dead cells in a crippled brain?

Yes, a little concussion gives you a lot to think about.

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