In spite of all you 
read about memory and the brain’s amazing ability to remember just about anything, we still search frantically for keys as we fly out the door... One book though, How to Develop a Perfect Memory, by Dominic O'Brien, is a terrific read. ... if you're interested in remembering things like an entire deck of playing cards … Ok ... it’s also useful for those interested in remembering everyday things like key locations, names, directions, numbers and those lost legs of your life, as well as just about everything else you’d like to recall....
Maybe you've fallen for the myth
that you can’t remember things anymore, regardless of what you do… Reality, though, shows how memory is connected more to how you store information, than how hard you try to remember... Better news still... you can learn strategies to retrieve facts when you need them. Lose keys? – snap them onto a bag you carry… forget names? Use them a few times to address the person soon after hearing the name…. Need to remember facts for a test? Draw simply pictures as you read the facts….When you link ideas to something familiar, you're hanging your new knowledge hat onto a familiar hook inside your noodle – so it tends to stick. Then, when you need fast facts – your brain knows where to find them. Think it will work with the keys… I put mine in the same place daily and luckily haven’t had to search for years.
What do you want to remember today…?
Ellen, as I read this, I'm wondering how our brain copes with so much clutter from our "information" society. For instance, we have so many names and numbers connected to us: phone numbers, passwords and user names, birthdays, meetings, network acquaintances. What does our brain do to sort out the important from the unimportant? I know you mention repeating important names, but what would brain science tell us about how to keep the "important" at the "tip of our brain?"
Posted by: Robyn McMaster | April 23, 2006 7:14 AM | Permalink to Comment