Memory-wise

by Anne Unkenstein

  I was at my parents’ house for dinner. The news was on TV and I was watching a story about a house fire, where two children had died. I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten to turn off my perfumed oil-burner candle that was sitting on my desk, surrounded by papers. I panicked and I could feel my heart thumping in my chest. ‘Oh no—our house could be in flames, and it’s all my fault.’ My fear was exacerbated by my recollection of another news story about a house fire caused by someone leaving their oil burner on. I rang our neighbour—who, thankfully, informed me that the house was still standing when she had driven past it five minutes previously. Since then, I’ve put the oil burner by the study door. Now I can’t help but see it—and of course blow the candle out—before I leave the room!

  Zara, 38

  If you need to remember to take certain medications, you can put them near the thing that acts as your memory trigger. For instance, if you take your tablets after you brush your teeth, put them near the toothpaste. If you take them with meals, put them somewhere obvious in the kitchen. If you have several medications to take at various times throughout the day, it can be helpful to keep them in a dosette box. This is a plastic box, divided up like a grid into compartments for the days of the week, with different time slots. You can sort your tablets into this box, which serves as a reminder to take the tablets, and also helps to keep track of the last time that you took them. Many people use homemade variations on this theme, or arrange for special blister packs to be made up by their local pharmacist.

  Some people find it useful to have a reminder that’s in view most of the time, or that they can’t avoid seeing. There are many different ways to do this, including putting a ring on a different finger, putting a knot in your handkerchief, putting a rubber band on your wrist, and putting your watch on the opposite wrist.

  My physiotherapist told me to put a fluoro-coloured dot sticker in places that I go regularly throughout the day, such as the toilet, the car and the kitchen pantry. He said that every time I see the coloured dot, I have to stop and do my exercises!

  Trish, 62

  What to take with you

  Some people have a special place, like the hall table near their front door, for things they need to take with them each day. Others create an obstacle at the front door with the object they need to take with them, so they can’t forget it! The front door is also a useful place to put a ‘sticky note’ telling you what to remember to take with you.

  Another option is to put what you want to take with you straight into your bag or briefcase. It helps to do this as soon as you think of it.

  At work, I often used to leave my food shopping in the fridge, instead of taking it home at the end of the day. Someone gave me a great tip. If you put your car keys in the fridge with the food, you can’t leave work without it! I use this idea to remember lots of things—I just put my car keys with whatever I need to remember to collect.

  Malcolm, 57

  Our supermarket no longer provides plastic bags to take your shopping home in, so that means I have to remember to take my own bags or I have nothing to transport my food home in. I keep some cloth bags in the passenger seat of my car, and I also keep a lightweight fabric bag within my handbag just in case I forget to take the cloth bags into the supermarket with me.

  Mia, 81

  It can be very frustrating when you leave your bag or umbrella somewhere, especially on public transport. One idea is to put the handle of these items around your wrist, so that they are attached to you, and you will notice them when you get up to leave.

  Where you are up to in a book

  Placing a bookmark in a book is a popular way of reminding ourselves where we left off the last time we were reading it. A bookmark can be a simple scrap of paper, or a fancy one made of exquisite embossed leather. Or you might be lucky enough to have a ribbon attached to the book—which has the added advantage that you don’t have to spend time looking for it.

  Alarms and technical devices

  Technical devices are an essential part of everyday life, and most of us use some sort of computer or phone. We might search the internet for information, send email messages or make use of one of the new applications (‘apps’) that seem to be developed on an almost daily basis to help us negotiate everyday life.

  Many of us are reluctant to use new technology. Some older people carry their mobile phone in case of emergency, and may not have learned how to send and receive text messages, let alone use the reminder function. When you haven’t grown up with computers and mobile phones, you sometimes feel nervous about learning how to use them. It is worth trying to overcome this hesitancy about new technology because our phones and computers can serve as valuable memory support systems. They are especially helpful with remembering what we have to do, and where we have put things. (For practical strategies for learning how to use new devices, see Chapter 7.)

  Something that you have to do

  Most phones and computers have a calendar or reminder function where you can type in what you need to remember at a specific time on a particular day. Make sure you type in full what the reminder is for, as a one-word reminder may not make any sense to you when it flashes up in a few weeks’ time! When the allotted time arrives, your phone will make a noise and your reminder will come up on the screen for you to read. Some location-based systems will provide a reminder when you’re near a particular location, and may provide details of how long it will take you to get to your appointment from your current location.

  Timely prompts like these can help us remember a whole range of things, such as attending an appointment, taking medication, or taking a blood sugar reading at a particular time. If the reminder comes at a time when we are not able to complete the task, many apps allow you to ‘snooze’ the reminder, and the reminder is repeated again later to make sure you don’t forget what you planned to do.

  Some people prefer to use an electronic pill reminder system rather than a computer or phone reminder system to assist with taking medication. These systems are a combination of a multi-compartment dosette box and an electronic alarm system. You can program these medication dispensers to sound an alarm and open the lid of a particular compartment on a specified day and time. Reminder alarms usually continue to sound until the medication is taken.

  If you are using an app on your device to remind you about an appointment or a birthday, it may be best to program the alarm to come on before the event, so that you have time to get ready for it. Digital calendars allow you to share or ‘synchronise’ your calendar with others, so as to create a streamlined family diary. They also have a handy ‘search’ function.

  You can use your smartphone to send a text message to yourself as a reminder, or perhaps to a friend or relative. If you have provided your mobile phone number, you will probably receive a variety of text reminders from health practitioners to attend appointments, the car mechanic to get your car serviced, or perhaps the library to take your books back on time. Your vet might even send messages to remind you to treat your pet with worming and flea prevention medication!

  If you search an app store or the internet, you will quickly find a whole range of memory-related apps that provide calendars, alarms, notes, to-do lists, spaced recall timing schedules, organising ideas, reminder text messages and stress management! The resources list at the end of this book has some websites to get you started on your memory-app search.

  Have you noticed that household appliances are becoming increasingly kind to us in terms of memory? Many electrical appliances, such as kettles and irons, now have built-in shut-off devices in case we forget to turn them off. Microwave ovens beep if we forget to take something out after we have cooked it, and the washing machine ‘talks’ to us when the washing is finished. We can attach automated timers to water taps and lights to turn them on and off. And that’s just the beginning! Many people enjoy turning their houses into ‘smart houses’ run by automated systems or devices that respond to voice commands.

 
; If you prefer a less technological approach, you can simply use an oven timer or inexpensive portable timer as a very handy household reminder device. You can set it to remind you to do many things—to turn the sprinkler off, to take the hand-washing out of the basin, or to wash the dye out of your hair. You just have to make sure you can hear the timer.

  Where something is located

  We can use location tracking technology to help us find many of our frequently lost possessions. A tracking device can be stuck to your keys, wallet, television remote control, and anything else that tends to go walkabout. These devices are readily available at electronics supply shops or online. When you lose an object that has a tracking tag stuck to it, you simply use an app on your phone to make the object sound an alarm. Some apps show you on a map where the object is located. You can also set up these systems so that they sound an alarm when the object is a certain distance from you.

  Trevor had been working as a plumber for many years before he was involved in a car accident and suffered a head injury that left him with memory difficulties. When he returned to work, he found that he kept leaving his equipment at the houses he visited. He would get in his car after finishing a job, drive off, get to the next job, and realise that he couldn’t do the job as he had left a vital tool at his previous job. These tools were often worth a lot of money, and he had already lost a few. I suggested that he put location tracking devices on his equipment—especially the expensive tools. That way he could program the tracking device to alert him when the specific tool was a certain distance away from him, and he could go back and get it straight away.

  Anne

  Many of us rely heavily on our smartphones these days to help manage our daily affairs, but they can be easily misplaced. It is so important to be able to find our smartphones, containing all our memory-support apps, that our phones often contain their own tracking device app.

  I’d been on the go all day. I’d done the shopping, come home to unpack the shopping, taken our dog to the vet, come home again and then driven to my parents’ house to take Dad to a doctor’s appointment. When I finally got home again that night, I went to call a friend and couldn’t find my phone. I panicked—it could be anywhere! I could have dropped it in the supermarket, at the vet’s, at the doctor’s. How was I going to find it? My daughter came to my rescue. ‘Mum, all you need to do is use this app and it will show you where your phone is.’ In just a few minutes, we had tracked my phone—I must have dropped it on the road when getting our dog out of the car. I often despair about what I see as negative effects of technology on our lives, but that phone tracking app is a definite positive!

  Ming-zhu, 52

  There have been some interesting innovations for frequently lost objects. You can buy an umbrella that not only sends an alert to your phone if you walk off without it, but also tells you whether you will need to take it according to the weather forecast! For those of us who repeatedly lose our glasses, you can now buy glasses with a tracking device built into them!

  Of course, there are also phone apps to tell us where we parked our car, or you could simply use the camera in your phone to take a photo of where it is parked before you leave it. Many cars now have a built-in GPS (global positioning system) to assist us with remembering how to get to a particular location, or we can use a phone app to provide directions when we are driving, walking or using public transport.

  Ask someone to remind you

  People are often excellent external memory aids (or aides)! You can always ask someone to remind you.

  Whenever we go away on holidays, I hide my jewellery in a special spot in the house. When we returned home from our last trip, it took me weeks to finally remember where I had hidden it! This year I am going to show my sister where it is hidden, so that she can remind me on our return.

  Esme, 74

  Other people also make willing external memory aides when it comes to recalling names. Don’t be embarrassed to ask—many people experience difficulty with remembering from time to time. At a social gathering or meeting, you can quietly ask someone the name of a person that you are about to talk to, before you walk over to them. Alternatively, if you meet someone and you recognise their face but can’t recall their name, it’s okay to say, ‘I recognise your face, but I can’t recall your name at the moment.’ You can sometimes even manage to have a conversation with someone without having to address them by their name.

  I’m good at remembering faces, but not names. My wife is good at remembering names, but not faces. So whenever one of us has trouble recalling a name or a face, we just ask each other for help. We make a good pair!

  Barry, 84

  When we go to social gatherings, my husband helps with my poor memory for names. For example, if we walked up to a man called Greg, he would include the name Greg at the start of our conversation, so that I could hear it. ‘Hello, Greg, we haven’t seen you for a while.’

  Beth, 72

  Rose works at a Senior Citizen’s centre and has to greet dozens of people every day. She is 78 and has difficulty remembering their names. This is where her friend Joan comes in! Joan knows everyone’s names. When someone comes up to Rose at the front desk, she says, ‘Hello dear, how are you today?’ Joan works in the kitchen behind the desk and when she hears Rose say, ‘Hello dear’, she comes up to the desk and immediately greets the person by name: ‘Oh, Ian, nice to see you.’ Rose can then also greet Ian, using his name. That’s creative memory teamwork at its best!

  Anne

  Should I use internal or external memory strategies?

  People sometimes think that it is ‘lazy’ to rely heavily on external strategies such as diaries, and may be concerned that it will make their memory worse: that they need to ‘use it or lose it’. Drilling your memory, by repeating the same thing over and over in order to get it into your memory files, may help you to remember what you have been repeating, but it will not necessarily make your general memory abilities better. For example, with extensive repetition you might be able to remember a long shopping list ‘in your head’, but this doesn’t mean that you will be any better at finding your car keys—and if you can’t drive to the supermarket, then your memory of the shopping items will not be required!

  To reject memory aids when they could make life easier is like rejecting reading glasses when you need them … don’t feel ashamed … what matters is that you continue to deal effectively with the environment.1

  As we get older, we tend to favour external memory strategies over internal.2 They are often easier to use; they can also be great fun and involve a bit of creativity, whereas the more complex internal strategies are not so ‘user-friendly’, requiring more time and a great deal of training and practice to master. Research shows that people tend to stop using complex internal strategies after a while. For instance, four months after a group of people had been trained to use the ‘peg-word’ method, half the people used it ‘very little’, and the other half did not use it at all.3 Some memory researchers even make the confession that they do not use their own techniques when they leave the lab.

  Everyday memory typically involves remembering things that we have seen or heard only once, or remembering to do something. For this type of daily memory use, external strategies are often more suitable. Researchers have found that external aids, including diaries and electronic reminder systems, are useful for remembering to do something.4

  The way we live our lives these days can lead to information overload. There is so much to remember! Sometimes it is just not practical to try to remember all of this information using internal strategies alone. It makes good sense, then, to offload some of this information to back-up systems, that we can refer to should the need arise.

  Using external strategies as back-up systems for remembering the more mundane aspects of life also leaves the mind more available for fun and creative pursuits. Instead of using up mental resources worrying about what needs to be remembered, you can turn your often limited at
tention elsewhere, and perhaps discover new things. For example, you can fill your diary up with names and appointments, and in your memory filing cabinet reserve your energy and time for organising the storage of more exciting information. This way, you will be able to more efficiently sort through your memories when you want to recall information.

  Albert Einstein is often quoted as an example of this approach. Apparently he said that he wouldn’t waste his mental energy on memorising his home phone number because it would only take a minute to look this information up. Einstein had other, more exciting, ideas that he wanted to occupy his mind with.

  Using the strategies that suit you best

  I interviewed a 73-year-old man at the kitchen table in his derelict house hundreds of kilometres from Melbourne. The first time I asked him when a particular event occurred, he stopped, then silently rose to a standing position and walked to the outside door; he stood there, peered outside and returned to his seat and answered ‘1956’. About two minutes later I asked another question, about his family. Again he rose, walked outside, went to the doorway and peered out, and when he returned sat down and proudly said ‘8th May 1961’. It just didn’t make sense, so I asked, ‘What takes you to the door?’ He answered—with a glint in his eyes—‘All my important dates are painted on my outside water tank and the one way to remember them is to get up and look.’

  Julie, 52

  When it comes down to it, the best memory strategies for you, as an individual, are the ones that you prefer, and the ones that work best for your own unique situation. You will probably use a mixture of internal and external strategies that suit you and your lifestyle.

  The strategies that you use now will also depend on what strategies you have used for memory management in the past. We tend to stick to what we are familiar with. You may also notice that your need for, and use of, strategies fluctuates over time. When we are busy, and our workload is heavy, it can be useful to rely more on external strategies, which use less of our available mental energy.