The Power of Forgetting (15 page)

Because we are picture-oriented creatures, nearly all memory techniques rely on some form of imagery, especially when it comes to objects and intangible things like people’s names or places. When you hear or see a word or phrase that seems abstract to you, think of something that sounds like it or that reminds you of the abstract material and can be pictured in your mind. We’ll see how this works in the sections coming up that cover how to remember names and faces, but for now let’s take a quick example. Say you want to remember a street named Kelton. You can’t easily “picture” that in your mind, but the word sounds pretty darn close to “Celtic,” so you could picture a Celtic tribe, or something else symbolic of Ireland, in your head. When you need to recall the street’s name, you could say to yourself, “I’m going to Ireland,” and maybe the association would be strong enough for you to remember the link to “Kelton.” Of course, it helps to strengthen the association with other details. Perhaps your friend who lives on this street has red hair and freckles, making the reference to Ireland all the more vivid and memorable. The key, though, is to create associations that work for you. Personalize them to your experience, knowledge, and sense of humor. And don’t overly complicate your associations or spend too long trying to force them. They should be easy and quick to create; if they’re not, find another association that works better.

The art of personal moviemaking is what also allows us
to recall certain information in a sequence. If you want to remember a list of items, an exercise I’m going to take you through shortly, having a story that moves from one scene to the next can help you recall that information correctly.

So there you have it. The combination of creating original awareness and employing the power of association, imagination, and storytelling (moviemaking) in our minds is the ticket to training our memories to be the best they can be. We’re going to see all of these tasks in action to a much greater degree throughout the rest of the book. I think it’s quite telling that we know now that absentmindedness, which routinely affects the vast majority of the elderly, is not necessarily a sign of illness. It’s also highly preventable.

What’s more, a growing number of studies have shown not only that mental exercises are a powerful preventive measure but also that they can slow down, halt, or even help to reverse disease. Some studies have proved that staying mentally active can slash the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease by half! And you’re never too old—or young—to start boosting your brainpower to stave off that kind of decline.

But here’s the catch: Although people think they are sharpening their thinking skills and mental acuity by playing Scrabble, completing crossword puzzles, or getting immersed in Sudoku, these games are very limited in how they challenge the brain; they don’t really recruit the parts of the brain that enhance its imagination, concentration, and observation. They are not going to help you when you need it most, such as in remembering where you placed your keys, remembering faces and names (particularly when you meet a roomful of people at once, which happens a lot at gatherings and parties), recalling phone numbers or other many-digit numbers,
mentally storing difficult words whose meanings are hard to remember, or picking up a foreign language. Which is where we’re going to next: I’m going to teach you my strategies for tackling these things, and those lessons will call upon all the ideas I’ve just described—namely, the beauty of awareness and association.

Absentmindedness means exactly what it says: You are absentminded when your mind is absent—when you perform actions without thinking. I’ve already pointed out that there’s a difference between what you see and what you observe. Our eyes do the seeing, but it’s our minds that do the observing, which entails a more complex process. Our minds have to go through a few steps in order to take in a new piece of information, organize it, and then place it somewhere. If the mind is not made aware that it’s supposed to notice the incoming information that the eyes are seeing, then it cannot complete its mission. Put simply, if your mind is neglected or is absent when you’re performing an action and seeing new information, then it cannot observe. It cannot create the all-important original awareness.

The remedy for absentmindedness should be obvious: making sure you generate original awareness when you’re in the middle of your action. You have to think of what you’re doing at a very conscious and active level. This means forcing yourself to generate an association on the spot. Otherwise, how else will you make yourself think of a minor action at the moment you’re doing it? It’s very easy to fall into the trap of doing things almost unconsciously, so you have to push
the envelope here by coercing your mind into finding an association, however bizarre or imaginative. After all, original awareness compels you to register something in your mind in the first place—when the moment occurs. The mere act of establishing original awareness via association should free you from absentmindedness, or at least help prevent as much of it as possible.

Let’s take an example. You’re at your desk tending to e-mails. You’re just about to respond to an important message marked “high priority (!)” when the phone rings. During your conversation, you minimize your e-mail program on the computer screen so you can open a file in another program and deal with the call, which becomes a long one. After the call is over and you hang up, you totally forget to return to that e-mail message. When the phone rings several hours later, it’s the person who sent you the message marked high priority, asking for an explanation. You had promised to reply right away, so what happened? How could you have forgotten? You’re deeply embarrassed and have to come up with an excuse. You’d love to avoid doing this kind of thing in the future, as it happens a lot.

Here’s what you need to do: The next time you’re pulled in another direction and want to remember what you were doing once that interrupting task or emergency is resolved, momentarily find a way to create a fast mental picture in your mind before you switch directions. If the e-mail you were about to write is going to your colleague Sally, then before you pick up the phone, “see” Sally with an angry look on her face because you’ve put her on hold. Or perhaps you could visualize Sally standing in front of your desk—frozen in time—with a stamped letter duct-taped to her forehead,
symbolizing the e-mail. She won’t come back to life until you get back to that e-mail. These ideas may sound silly, but they will force you to think of what you were doing at the time you were interrupted.

I’ll be honest: Making a habit of forming associations like this every time you want to remember something while shifting gears or performing an action takes practice. You’ll probably have to force yourself to make associations in your daily activities for a little while until you establish the habit, at which point it becomes relatively automatic.

When you do make these associations, it helps to make them as absurd and visual as possible. For example, if you drop your keys on your dining room table (where you usually never leave them) because you’re dashing to pick up a ringing phone in the kitchen, you’d do well to drum up a wild image, such as your keys being thrown into a fruit salad and taking on the appearance of a piece of fruit. Or “see” your keys hanging from the chandelier and dripping with ketchup or barbecue sauce. This association, by the way, can be made in a fraction of a second—you don’t even have to break your stride. While the mere act of consciously thinking about your keys as you put them down likely will help you remember where they are, the association you’ve made with the contents of the dining room (chandelier and food) definitely will help you remember where you put them.

How many of us have put a treasured item in a “safe” spot—a really good hiding place—and then torn our hair out trying to find it again? Or never seen it again? It doesn’t have to be that way. All you have to do is generate a weird and vivid association in your head as you tuck your special item away. For instance, say you want to keep five hundred dollars
in cash for emergency purposes, so you put it in a box that is destined to sit atop a bookcase for a very long time. As you place the box on top of the bookcase, take a second to “see” the box becoming attached to the bookcase as if it were a big button that opens a secret passageway behind the bookcase, which, in your mind’s eye, leads to a safe with your money in it. Absurd? Yes.

Memorable? Yes. The next time you think of that box, no matter how long after you’ve placed it on top of your bookcase, you’ll know exactly where it is.

Tired of leaving items at friends’ houses? Or leaving your house and forgetting to bring something with you? Association solves all of these problems. Just be sure to create an association that leads you from one thing to another. If you don’t want to leave behind the serving tray for your contribution to a potluck dinner at your friend’s house, then while you’re entering your friend’s foyer at the start of the evening, picture the platter on the front steps and imagine that you’re stepping on it as you leave the house, smashing it into pieces. This picture will associate the platter with the moment of leaving. Add one more helpful image by associating the platter with your car if you traveled to your friend’s dinner party by car. Imagine the platter as replacing your windshield. When you get back into your car after dinner, if you don’t have your platter with you, you might remember to go get it if you just look at the windshield.

When making these kinds of associations, it helps to associate items with the last thing you normally see or do as you’re leaving a place. If you don’t want to leave your cell phone at work (again), then, as you’re putting your cell phone down for the day, see yourself using it to call the elevator up to your eleventh-floor office. Most of us leave our homes and
lock them with a key. Find ways of associating any items that you don’t want to leave behind with locking the front door. Picture your rent check, which needs to be mailed, as the actual key to lock the door when you write out your check and seal the envelope.

As you can see, it’s all about making associations and generating ones that reflect the very things you’re trying to remember. This isn’t the same as just tying a string around your finger, scribbling a note to yourself, or setting the alarm clock to remember to take the roast out of the oven. Often we fail to create effective reminders for ourselves because we make no relevant associations. So what happens is that we’re alerted to recall something but don’t remember what that something was (unless we really did write it down in detail)! The whole point of creating associations is to achieve two important goals: (1) to generate the reminder, that is, to create original awareness, and (2) to clue yourself in to what it is that you need to be reminded of. The next time you’re baking and want to go catch a thirty-minute television show as your cake bakes in the oven, go ahead and set an alarm in the kitchen, but also bring a spatula with you to the den and place it on top of the television or in the middle of the coffee table before you.

Just think of all the frustration you’ll now avoid by applying the simple rule of association. You’ll never have to turn back home and check to see that you turned the oven off, unplugged the iron, or locked the front door. You’ll never lose time searching for your “misplaced” keys, cell phone, or wallet. (And hopefully you’ll never call yourself “forgetful” in a negative manner; being unable to remember important things isn’t about being forgetful in a traditional sense.) You’ll have seen your keys scratching your television screen
as you placed them on top of the TV; you’ll have seen your cell phone calling your dog as you dropped it on the table by Fido’s favorite spot in the living room; and you’ll have pictured yourself getting folded into your wallet as you tossed it into the top drawer of your desk. Don’t spend too much time coming up with the perfect image to make the association. The image you choose isn’t as important as the fact that you’re forcing yourself to think of the act in the moment you’re doing it. It’s like “grabbing your mind by the scruff of the neck and forcing it to think of a specific thing at a specific moment,” as Lorayne and Lucas so perfectly describe it. The first time you try this technique it will feel strange and perhaps ridiculous. But over time you’ll become accustomed to it and it will become a ritual—a habit that you won’t want to break because it’ll save your day in more ways than one.

When my son was seven years old, he asked me one day during our drive home what the numbers on his water bottle meant: 120507. I told him that it was probably a code for the date when the bottle would expire: December 5, 2007. We usually play games with letters and numbers during our drives, so for fun I told him to remember that number and that I’d ask him to recall it the next day. The next day he remembered the number, and then I added the number 3 to it. Again, I told him to recite this new number the next day, which he did. This went on for quite some time. I gave him a new number to add to the sequence every day by posting it on his bedroom door at night. Josh would review the sequence every night once he had the new number to add. After several months, he had a two-hundred-digit number written into his brain. How did he do it? What strategy did he use?

To memorize a long number like that, you can’t rely on repetition or rote memorization. That just won’t work for such a confusing array of arbitrary numbers. I didn’t give Josh any clues to memorizing this sequence of numbers as new ones were added, but when I asked him later on how he managed to achieve such a feat, I was proud of his ingenuity.