Tag Memory

Try to remember

Michael 12 Comments

I often amaze myself at some of the things I remember and some of the things I forget. I reminded myself of the odd things I recall over the weekend while putting on a pair of walking shoes. I have always, or for at least  since I was 5 or 6, put both shoes on then tie both shoes. I know some people will don one shoe and tie it, then do the same with the other. (Can you actually “don” a shoe or does don imply something going over you rather than something you put yourself into? Hmm. I’ll look that up sometime and probably turn it into a blog post.) (Anyway…) I also always put the right shoe on first. I wonder if that’s because I’m left handed, but maybe not because I’m not exclusively left handed. I write, eat, and paint with my left hand but I play sports right handed. I can bat in baseball either left or right handed but it doesn’t much matter because I’m not that good at it from either side. My forte on the ball field was behind the plate, and there I wore my catcher’s mitt on my left hand and threw with my right. Things with a racket like tennis, ping pong, badminton, and probably pickle ball if I ever took that up, I play right handed, but I wonder like with a baseball bat, if I could handle a racket in either hand. I golf right handed but since I really don’t see the point of golf, that was very seldom and very long ago. Of course the piano is played with both hands so I fit right in there. Where was I again? Oh yes….

I often amaze myself at some of the things I remember and some of the things I forget. While putting on a pair of walking shoes I suddenly, without warning, reminded myself why I put both shoes on then tie them. Years and years and years and years and years ago (I am getting up there!) as I was putting on the right shoe and then tying it, then the doing the same with the left shoe, an older, wiser one told me I shouldn’t do it that way. I had never thought of it and by then I probably had no preference, being only 5 or 6 at the time. But the older brother of the boy across the street who I always played with cautioned us against such reckless dressing. I can still hear him. “What happens if you get halfway through and a fire starts right behind you. You’re going to run out of the building and into the street with just one shoe on. If you put both shoes on and then tie them, if you get halfway through when that fire starts and you run out of the building, you’ll have both shoes on. But you better stop to tie them as soon as you can or you might trip.” Now, he was all of 10, maybe 11 years old, twice as old as we were. How could we not heed advice like that for a lifetime. And I still don(?) both my shoes then tie them.

On the other hand, last week I was in the store in front of the light bulb display. Lightbulbs are getting very complicated. There are fluorescent, halogen, HD, LED, and very once in a very great while, an old fashioned incandescent. I needed to replace a bulb in a lamp that I would typically put a 60 watt bulb into. Bulbs today don’t come in those old standard wattages we learned as youngsters. 100 watt for reading, 25 for appliances, 5 watt for night lights, 60 for everything else except the three way bulbs which never seemed to work anyway. Now they are odd numbers like 17 and 23 watt when they’re even marked in wattages. More often, light bulbs now are labeled in something called lumens. What’s a lumen anyway? Spellcheck doesn’t even know from lumens! When that trend started a few years ago, I took the time to learn the equivalent desired luminosity for each typical lamp and its intended use. But now, standing in front of rows and rows of light bulbs, could I remember what number I needed in lumens? Nope. All I could hope for was that one of the cartons would say “60 watt equivalent.” Seeing none that were, I moved on to the next item on the list. Shoelaces.

Now, did those shoes have 3 or 4 holes?

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Something I said?

Michael 9 Comments

I was speaking with a friend who was stuck for something he couldn’t remember. “Oh, you know. It was something you said, you must remember.” “Something I said?” “Yeah, something you said. Oh, we were at, umm, give me a minute, hmm hmm hmm,” and that point he started humming. Humming.  A tune, a little ditty, a song. It could have been my imagination stemming from his comment “something you said” added to the fact that I and just gotten out of the car and the David Benoit song, Something You Said, was playing on the radio, but I was certain that was the tune he was humming. Whatever it was, he had hummed his way to remembering. “Yeah, I got it. You said…” and off we went into our conversation, that to be honest, right now I don’t remember at all. Maybe I should start singing to myself and it will come to me.

All sorts of people, from the giants in cognitive sciences to everyday bloggers, have written about memory. There are tips and tricks to tackle, vitamin pills to pop, herbs to brew into faux teas, and almost none of them work…except for the one that works for you. I’ve heard that if you want to tell somebody something and you don’t remember what, go back into the room where you first thought of it and it will come to you. I’ve heard if you recreate the original environment in which something happened, it will comeback to you. Cook something from your past, look at pictures from your past, all great ideas except…how do you know what room to go back to if you don’t know what you want to remember? How will cooking Grandma’s almost famous pear butter help you remember where you put your insurance card and car registration the nice police officer just asked for? If you remember that you forgot something but you don’t remember what it is, how will you know what environment to recreate? You could be reliving your third date with the second person you dated in your first year of grad school when you should be soaking in a hot tub on the back patio with fireworks booming over the city just on the other side of those trees.

It is said scents are a powerful memory aid as is music, but I think those are more for abstract memories. You smell something and it reminds you of something you did or somewhere you went. A particular song jogs free a recollection of a specific event or a special, or even not so special person in your life’s past. But if you want to remember where you put the combination to the suitcase locks that you use maybe once a year, sniffing all the pineapples in the produce section isn’t going to loosen that bit of information, not even if you want the suitcase to pack for a week in Hawaii.

No, for that kind of memory jogger, I believe we’re stuck with the classic folk remedies and you might as well get to retracing those steps and rebuilding that scene. Actually, there is something to those methods, and to my friend’s humming interlude, that is far superior to the “fling everything in the air and see if you can spot what you’re looking for coming down” method of remembering – they all force you to calm your mind.

I’m no cognitive scientist so I’m likely wrong about this, but I don’t think it has anything to do with where you are, what you’re smelling, or what size kettle Grandma use for that pear butter. Think about it, when you retrace your steps. What are you doing? You are saying to you self, “Self, look around and see what seems special about here,” or, “okay, Grandma had 3 really big pots, now what color were they?” or, “why did I tie this string on my finger?” All of them are other ways of saying, “calm down and think. You can figure this out.” It doesn’t matter whether those old wives tales are true because they aren’t actually jogging your memory. But it matters that for you, there is a truism among them because it is the one that gets you to calm yourself and allow you mind to pull that memory into your consciousness.

So the next time you need to remember something, just tell yourself, “I can do this. Let me think calmly and rationally. After all, it was probably something I said.”

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Hi, Confused to Meet You

Michael 8 Comments

This weekend a seminarian came to our church to start his year long spiritual internship as it were. At the end of the mass he stood on the altar and after introducing himself he said, “I’ll be at the back of the church and would like to meet all of you personally . I won’t remember all of your names but over the next year, I’ll try.” If it had been me saying that I would have made it “I won’t remember any of your names but over the next year I’ll forgot the couple that I accidentally had remembered. And it will probably at the absolute worst time.”

You see, of all the billions of data that I’ve committed to memory over all the years that I’ve been exposed to data, I can remember almost all of it, from every important work piece to the most useless of useless trivia. Except names. I tried all of the memory tricks. Use somebody’s name three times in the first 10 minutes of being introduced. Associate the name with some physical characteristic. Build a mnemonic that describes where and Forgotwhen you met that person. None of it worked. I even tried doing what I did to remember the billions of data that I did remember and is rolling around in my head. I just remembered. But it seems I’ve never been good with names. Why, it took me almost 4 years to learn my own mother’s name. And that’s most surprising since almost everybody’s mother’s name back then was Mommy.

So how did I manage to go through life with such a disconnect from the most personal of other people’s personal information? I guess I always had cheat sheets around. While in the army, everybody wore their name above their right pocket. As long as I didn’t mind to appear to be somewhat not all quite focused I could pass my eyes over their collar looking for rank, down to their pocket for surname and in one almost smooth motion would greet Captain Hook. In the hospitals and other medical facilities everyone wears name badges. Except for the few who inexplicably wore their identification cards on the hems of their shirts or jackets it was easy enough to spot the picture card and zero in on the name. At the college the entire clinical faculty was into wearing white jackets with their names stitched above the breast pocket. Except me. I didn’t care much for wearing consultation jackets while standing at the front of a lecture hall. It struck me as the same useless gesture as those who wear scrubs in a hospital yet never move from their desks in the administration wing except to go home.

When I didn’t have a visual cue to jolt me into name recognition I relied on the old standby. Everybody became “sir” or “ma’am.” Actually, that worked out quite well in my career ladder climb. People to whom I reported liked that I call to them with such politeness while everyone else junior to them tried to feign familiarity by beginning each conversation with “Well Bob,” or “If you have a minute Sue.” As I rose to have more who reported to me I continued with “sir” and “ma’am” and endeared my staff to me with my gentility while other department heads routinely referred to their crew as “the minions of 4 Central” or some similar certainly meant to be cute appellation.

So, my advice to you if you should ever become a seminarian assigned to your pastoral learning experience and don’t think you can remember everybody’s name before your year is up, do what I did. Don’t try. Make them all sirs and ma’ams. They’ll appreciate the courtesy. Or, you can just think of them all as useless trivia and you can probably commit a few billion names to memory. Just don’t let the pastor find out.