14 DAY TRIAL // Does your memory play tricks on you? Don't get impressed, it happens to all of us, but this has solutions.
1.Attention is primordial. If you concentrate on your daily activities you can avoid many complications. Where are my glasses? Why am I going to the kitchen? Each time you do something, like taking off the glasses, take a break and make an observation. You can even say out loud: Attention, I am going to take off my glasses. Choose two places in your house where to always put the glasses, and never forget them somewhere else. The same way, before going to the kitchen, repeat to yourself what you are going to do there.
The attention allows different functions of the memory to help each other. Do you want to memorize a phone number or a song's lyrics? Just repeat it in a loud voice. This adds the sound and speech memory to the visual one. That's why teachers always want to capture the attention of the children.
2.Repetition is the key. Actors, sportsmen, musicians and dancers know it very well: repetition is the only way of generating automatisms that makes the flight of an interpretation. A repetition made with attention, delight has nothing tiresome in it. Once learned, the text is fixed in the habit memory, opposed to the "pure" memory, which refers to a recall not of the text itself but of its reading.
But the memory is not a hard disk and its reliability is not absolute. Many piano virtuosos always play in front of the open score, for certainty. But repetition has an important role in our daily life. Yesterday we saw a movie. If we do not recall it, we will forget it. If for an instant the next day we repeat the movie in our head or comment on it with our colleagues, we will be able to recall it for a longer period.
Do you want to remember an amazing holiday in its smallest details? Then recall in the evening what you did that day. Do you have a diary? This is the best, as it will multiply the possibilities of recalling the main events of our lives.
3.Emotions make wonders. They will make our records more vivid. We instantly memorize an event if it has significantly touched us. Our first memories are linked to a strong emotion: a boat crossing, an accident, the death of an animal... A love crush is something unforgettable with all the insignificant issues that accompany it, and which remain recorded in our mind like a memory mirror. It has the capacity to subordinate everything around us.
4.Association between ideas is the gate to memories. It is not enough to think about the past; it is also important to recall the memories. When memorizing the information it is better to associate it with a context, classify it, put it in order, even give it a name. Recalling is localizing: an isolated memory is destined to disappearance. That's why the multiplication table goes by itself when recalling it.
5.Memory is longing for sense. It is difficult to memorize numbers at random, but it is easier to do it with the phone numbers of our friends. We will retain the name of the people we see or know. Right now, you are doing the best possible exercise for the memory: reading. Reading employs the functioning of many complementary abilities: attention, visual perception, words' identification, elaboration of mental images, information organization... Well, everybody complains of his/her memory, but nobody of his/her good reasoning.