Hi Everyone,Last Thursday 8th August,Ken,Daryl and myself attended a talk on “Remembering Well” by memory specialist Mrs Anne Unkenstien.
I noted several statements and one liner facts that Anne spoke of that may be of interest to share.
The first thing made clear was that nobody has a perfect memory and that memory lapses are a normal event for all of us.
The new memory storage part of our brain is called the Hippocampus which stores our newest and short term memories.When through continuously revising a memory it then becomes stored in other various structures of the brain with the Hippocampus then becoming the recall button to retrieve the memory.
As we age the Hippocampus begins a shrinking process and that reduces our ability to store new and short term memories as we did when we were younger.

So how do we improve our memory?

We need to use as many of our senses as possible and at the same time try to include–hearing,seeing,smelling,touching and movement.

Where possible use tricks or statergies:

The example given was how to remember a pin number for your bank account.
The trick:- Use a memory from your long term memory such as the last four digits from the first telephone your family used to have or part of a registration number of your first car:
WHY- because our long term memory improves as we age!

Another example given related to a shopping list.Catagorize your purchases into what are the dairy products,bathroom products,fruits,vegetables etc as this technique helps our recall to become more efficient.

Factors contributing to poor memory.

Poor sleep,anxiety,depression,some medications,lack of interest,not wanting to be continuously curious in our day to day lives and not ever wanting to improve ourselves on many levels.

Other considerations.
Manage risk factors such as staying as healthy on all levels as you can be.(Whatever you can do for your cardio-vascular system is equally as good for your brain.)
*Stay mentally alert by continually learning.
*Socialise often,talk to others about whats going on in your life.(Sounds a bit OM:NI doesn’t it).
* Regular daily evercise.
*Soduko,Crosswords,Reading,Play an instrument all improve memory.

Mentally challenge yourself daily with something new;the example given was to memorize a friends mobile phone number by breaking it down into two number blocks(05/14/33/55/98) at a time then keep repeating it regulary.This moves it from the Hippocampus to the long term memory storage areas of the brain)

In essence:-
Pay attention as much as possible and focus on what your doing otherwise information will just slip by.Use it or loose it.
To study this subject further Anne has written a book called”Remembering Well”that can be purchased or able to be borrowed from some libraries.
Cheers
Ron W 🙂