By Billy Crawford
If you have spent time recently searching for your car keys, having to program your car’s GPS to safely arrive on time at your doctor’s appointment, working WordSearch or the daily NEA Crossword Puzzle to keep your “brain sharp”, arriving at the grocery store without the grocery list, reading your Daily Devotional Guide for that much needed Positive Start, then you and I have a lot in common.
Following a recent successful carotid artery surgery, I have spent time reading and studying the Six Memory Boosters article by Charan Ranganath, director of the Memory Lab at University of California. I found the article so encouraging I thought I would share excerpts with you.
The next time you lose your keys or blank out on the name of your next-door neighbor, resist the urge to Google “signs of early dementia.”
“We expect our memory to function as an archive of the past, the good doctor explains. “In reality, our brain selectively whittles and prunes what gets stored so it can perform its main jobs, which includes planning for the future, building self-awareness, decision making, imaging and communication.”
Misplacing our credit card or a friend’s name doesn’t foreshadow our imminent cognitive decline, though they do become increasingly common when we get older. Our knowledge of the world and our lived experiences, on the other hand, “remain relatively intact in healthy aging.”
So, please consider including these six turbocharge tips below in your daily routines:
Turbocharge Tip #1: Reverse the “doorway effect.”
When you enter a room with a sense of purpose, only to freeze, ask why did I come in here?
Whether we are leaving a store, church, walking from one room to another–any time our perception of our environment changes–our brain creates mental bookmarks called event boundaries that divide our day into distinct before-and-after sections for easier recall later on.
If you are in the living room when you realize you left eyeglasses in the kitchen, an event boundary is created when you enter the kitchen. Unless we are actively mentally repeating get glasses from the kitchen island as you enter the kitchen, our brain is easily distracted by the fresh sites, smells (Are those cookies?!) and poof, there goes our memory. If we lose the thread, try to recall what we are thinking about back in the living room or physically return to it.
Turbocharge Tip #2: Use the Post-it trick.
People often lose track of our most-used items because our novelty brains tend to gloss over routine activities like plunking down our glasses. It’s not that we don’t have any memory of where we put our glasses, the good doc says, “It’s that we put our glasses in many, many places,” so searching for them is like scanning hundreds of sticky notes and expecting one to jump out.
Paying attention to details about where we place things will help us find them!
Turbocharge Tip #3: Become a monotasker.
Thanks to modern technology, we can chat on the phone, work a crossword puzzle, dismiss a news alert, ” Every time we shift back and forth between tasks, there is a lag as our brain reorients” says Constance Schmidt, professor emeritus of psychology at Middle Tennessee University, who studies multi-tasking. “Even micro interruptions we think we are ignoring are disruptions–your attention is captured and interruptions have cognitive costs. Even if you don’t answer a text message, we’ve already lost the battle.”
Turbocharge #4: Read a novel.
When evaluating new patients, one of the first questions a particular Washington D.C. neurologist and neuropsychiatrist asks is, “Are you a reader?” If the patient response includes, “I used to read lots of fiction but not anymore,” that’s a red flag for potential cognitive decline, says a clinical professor of neurology at George Washington University School of Medicine. “Reading fiction is a challenge to our working memory, which has to follow a plot and keep track of characters.
Our memory isn’t nearly as challenged by nonfiction, which lets us skip around and skim.”
Turbocharge #5: Create a giant strawberry and make it ride a cow.
When five-time USA Memory Champion Nelson Dellis needs to memorize as many decks of cards as he can in an hour–his personal best is 20–he turns to mnemonics, a category of memory tools that includes creating outlandish visual images like that cowboy berry.
Turbocharge #6: Take more pictures with our minds.
The next time you’re treated to a gorgeous sunset, resist the urge to whip out your smartphone. “Filtering life through a camera lens takes us out of the moment,” Ranganath says, “stealing our attention away from the parts of the experience we really want to remember later on.”
I hope you found this information helpful– please join me in following these tips and please consider passing them on to your friends.