3 tips for those who have become too forgetful

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

An excerpt from the book of the Japanese neurosurgeon Takashi Tsukiyama "Forgetfulness is my second … something there" about the brain problems associated with modern life.

Make it easier to remember information

First, try to remember often what you want to remember. For example, if you remember the name of that person every time you see someone's face, then eventually it will immediately pop up in your memory by itself.

The second method is grouping information. There is a phenomenon called the "magic number seven." Its essence is that a person can simultaneously memorize a limited number of information elements, for example, words or numbers. Someone can remember 7, someone - only 3, on average this number is 5 ± 2. If the elements of information are greater than this value, then the person forgets it. It turns out that the amount of data that we can easily memorize is very limited.

But if you group the information, you can remember much more.

For example, if you are told to memorize the names of all professional baseball players, you are unlikely to be able to do this. The task becomes doable if you group them. For example, let's first divide everyone into two leagues: Pacific and Central. Then we'll see which teams make up these leagues. Then you can remember the names of the team infielders. If we group all the names in this way, we can remember them more, and it will be easier to remember them too.

The third method is to create as many "clues" as possible in order to make it easier to remember. For example, if you always meet people in the same office, it will be more difficult for you to remember who is who among them. But if you change the place of the meeting, then you can remember: "This is the person with whom we met there somewhere." The place will become a "clue" for memory. It will be even easier for you to remember the person if you connect other facts to this. For example, what you did together, or what you gave him, etc.

To easily retrieve information from memory, it is extremely important to use any of these techniques. It's no surprise that you can't remember something if you haven't used any of these methods.

Our brain is designed in such a way that it tries to remember everything that we have seen and heard (which is why we sometimes suddenly remember what, as it seemed to us, we have long forgotten). But if we do not use the cognitive functions of the brain while memorizing information, then we will not be able to immediately extract it from memory when we want to.

Get rid of brain freezes

[…] Did your memory fail again? It's okay, write down in detail in a notebook what specifically you could not remember. Try to remember it all the same or find some information about what you forgot. And next time, do your best so that new such information does not fly out of your head. This measure alone will prevent the symptoms from getting worse. If you don’t make such “hints” to yourself, you will simply close your eyes to the fact that you have forgotten something again, and you will forget even the very fact that it happened.

The second thing you need to do is practice speaking for a long time. Let your family help you with this. Your goal is not just to lead a long story, but to ask the interlocutor to ask clarifying questions and to pronounce in detail exactly those moments that you are not used to discussing, which are not brought to automatism. At first it will be difficult for you to express your thought harmoniously, there will be pauses in the story every now and then, but this is training in creating new "add-ons" and maintaining the conditions where they can arise.

I seem to be writing about obvious things. But it is the obvious things that tend to suddenly disappear from our lives. If you compensate for "something" that you stopped doing, then you will be on the mend. After all, just reading aloud or doing arithmetic exercises is not a panacea.

It is also very useful to do something new. You can go to learn something that is far from your specialty, start taking interesting courses, learn something new from family members. For those who are constantly in the position of a teacher, it is sometimes useful to leave the usual chair of the teacher and become a student. This will give you the opportunity to find something new in the already familiar and look at things from a different angle.

Ultimately, the youthfulness of the brain is determined by how many interests a person has, how often he has to solve intellectual problems, and how much his life is filled with new things.

The brain of a person who has a lot of this in his life always remains “young” at any age. Conversely, the brains of young people, deprived of such diversity in life, can quickly "age". We can say that the “youthfulness” of the brain depends only on the number of new tasks. Anyone who is faced with "freezing" of the brain, it is imperative to make their life more diverse.

Conquer Internet Addiction

People with Internet addiction often complain that they not only have become worse at remembering everything, but rather have become worse at remembering. At the beginning of the book, I already wrote about the causes and consequences of this phenomenon: if a person has a convenient device at hand that will perform some functions for him, he will certainly shift these tasks to him.

The person does not try to diligently remember something, but replaces this process with a simple search on the Internet. The ability to retrieve information from memory is lost. And when a person has a rare opportunity to remember something himself, he cannot do it and feels “hanging”. […]

There is one nuance in the fight against Internet addiction: the Internet is always at our fingertips. The fact is that in the treatment of any addiction, the patient is first of all removed from what causes it. In the case of the Internet, this is difficult to do, because it is needed both for work and for communication.

Then an effective way would be to remove the first stage of entering the virtual world.

For example, if a person has a habit, coming to work, immediately sit down at the computer and check mail, and then browse endlessly different sites, then you need to get rid of it. As soon as a person starts to "sit" on the Internet, his attention adjusts to the web surfing. The emotional system perceives this as something pleasant, and it becomes more difficult to stop. The very process of turning on the computer and viewing mail is just part of the usual activities. Therefore, from the point of view of the properties of the brain, it is easiest to get rid of it.

When you do this, and instead of the usual actions you have to immediately take on boring work, you will probably want to return everything back. To prevent this, it is necessary to please the emotional system in other ways. Take a short break from your computer and have a delicious coffee or something else.

After many hours of work at the computer, you must definitely go for a walk or somehow provide your eyes with a warm-up. This will allow the brain to switch over and use its other functions.

Read about other common brain problems and examples of coping with them in Forgetfulness Is My Second … Something. How to get back what is constantly flying out of my head. It will be useful to everyone who forgets the names of acquaintances, has difficulty concentrating on work, or is experiencing a creative crisis.