The Written Podcast: Forgetting Things

It doesn’t matter how good your memory is, I’m confident in saying we all would like to have a better memory. We all forget things. Some people are gifted with remembering seemingly every piece of information they’ve ever been in contact with; other people seem to forget the very last thing that was either said to them or they read. There are methods which can help with enhancing your memory, but whether they are effective or not I cannot comment on as I’ve never used one of those methods. Nutritionists claim a certain diet can improve your memory, keeping your brain healthy at all times. It’s been noted that sitting in front of a computer for many hours each day can dramatically reduce your memory; we need to step outside more, ready a book more, play Sudoku more. But that’s the thing, these tactics people say are designed to enhance your memory may do just that, but they also phrase their findings as their way will completely prevent you from ever forgetting anything ever again. The person with the world’s most powerful memory will without a doubt admit to having forgotten something. It doesn’t matter how good your memory is, we all forget something at some point.

It’s quite sad when your start to realise that the majority of us have forgotten more than what we’ve learnt. How much information have we consumed at some point but then faded away? How much interesting facts have we stumbled upon only for them to disappear, never to be remembered again; and on some cases, we don’t even know we’ve forgotten them. Our brains are capable of extraordinary things, imagining the most wondrous fantasies, creating the most sophisticated technologies, piecing together seemingly impossible mysteries; yet our memories often prevent us from doing any of that because we’ve forgotten some crucial piece of information needed to help make whatever advancement needed.

How many times have your forgotten to do something at work? How many times have you forgotten to do something at home? How many times have you forgotten to do something when out and about? How many times have you forgotten in general? I certainly don’t know the exact number of times; nor can I even give you a rough estimation. It’s impossible to know for sure just how much information I’ve forgotten over my 24 years (soon to be 25 years).

It’s annoying when we forget. We may be a victim of a string of moments were nothing seems to sit in our brains; we just forget everything. Other times we may surprise ourselves with how excellent and seemingly flawless our memories are being. Those random moments of good and bad times only cements how mysterious our memories really are, because even though we do have some control over our memories – by teaching ourselves how to do this or that, speak another language, other times our memory is in control of us.

Muscle memory is a different type of memorising. Muscle memory is where we’ve done whatever it is so many times we don’t need to pause to think about how to do it, we just go ahead and do it immediately. There’s no period where we have to piece together what to do in our heads, we instantly know how to do it. Driving, touch-typing on a keyboard, the Doctor Who universe to name a few are all in what is known as muscle memory. Of course, it’s not a section where information gets filed to, we just learn how to do it and conduct what to do so many times we are confident in knowing we can never forget what’s in our muscle memory. I doubt I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning having completely forgotten how to drive a car, or how to perform touch-typing on a keyboard, or who the companion is in series 3 of the revived Doctor Who; incidentally it’s Martha Jones, playing by Angela Freeman (and now I did not have to look that up on Google to remember)

The easiest way to help remember any piece of information you have is to write it down. The act or taking a pen to paper and writing down what the other person is saying, helps massively. I deal with countless customers per day, both external and internal, and I’m getting constantly bombarded with information from every angle – required to remember pretty much everything I’ve been given to be used at a later time that very same day or later on in the week or further. I may take a customer’s phone number, but there’s no way I’d be able to remember every digit in that precise order straight away. Maybe if I dedicated a couple of hours solely remembering that string of numbers, I might be able to, but now when given to me there and then. The act of writing the number down on a notepad brings with it a sense of relief later on. Wanting to phone up a customer, I don’t have to strain myself in the hopes of guessing what they said, I’ll never remember the number first time. The relief that comes with knowing I have their number written down so I don’t have to worry about remembering, is of itself a powerful method of helping you remember things, paradoxically speaking.

By writing things down to prevent myself from worrying about remembering it later, I greatly reduce to stress of worrying whether I will remember that specific piece of information when I’m called upon to remember it so – finding it written down on my notepad relieves me of that pressure, prevents me from clouding my brain with worry, therefore keeping it relaxed to help me remember more. Whilst, of course, this method won’t actually allow me to have the most powerful memory in the world, but the act of writing it down means I don’t need to have one….

I’d like to think I do have a good memory, though. There’s certainly a lot of important information I need to remember, I have indeed remembered, but there are other times when of course, forgetting things does get in the way. Whether other things get in the way, you naturally just don’t do what you need to do, and that in turn can be very frustrating… it’s when we forget to write down what we’re required to remember do we then have a reason to start worrying, maybe?

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)