vbthedog

As I get older, I am starting to forget things. Nothing serious you understand, just small things, mainly of the “I must remember that” just to be ironic. A good example would be a story I might hear on the radio and want to pass on, or my mental shopping lists might not be as sharp as they used to be.

As a teenager, I was very involved in the Boy Scouts, and I remember vividly (another irony) that one of the ‘tests’ for a badge – which were very coveted – was for memory. The way to learn to get a good memory was to place a few items on a tray, memorise them, have the tray taken away and then write down as many as you could remember. As you got better, then you simply kept adding more items to the tray and repeated the exercise.

It works too!

I have always had a decent memory – I can remember really stupid things such as phone number in the UK 40+ years ago, the rego number of all the cars I have owned and directions to places. Another trick I learned was to use mnemonics to reference street names in sequence for example.

Names I do have an issue with; I can never remember the art of repeating the name back when someone introduces themselves and I think it is possibly too late to change that one now. But a new trick I did think of the other day seems to work in other areas quite well.

Back in the early days of the personal computer revolution, when memory was at a premium and developers fought for every single 1K they could get, a very neat program came out called “Sidekick” and this took advantage of a little bit of protected memory, allowing you to load a small notepad and calendar/diary/address book. (I have a theory that the reason many programs these days are so bloated is that developers no longer have to do this. They have all the memory they need and have therefore got lazy).

So what you ask? They are a dime a dozen these type of applications.

Not then (circa 1984). We only had MSDOS and 640K which was NOT multitasking – ie: technically only one program at a time could be running –  so this was a MAJOR breakthrough. Millions and millions of copies were sold, and this marked the beginning of, at the time, one of the behemoths of the software industry, Borland. Eventually Borland fell apart by trying to do what so many did – take on Microsoft. But that’s another story.

I got to wondering; could I train my brain to keep a small piece of my memory “protected” and make it available for easy recall. And because I knew in what part of my memory I stored this “stuff”, I wouldn’t have to rack my brains so to speak to find stuff I wanted to remember. Somewhat like putting your keys and wallet always in the same place if you like.

Early testing seems to indicate it works. The longer term is the true indicator of course.

I’ll keep you posted. If I can remember.

As I get older, I am starting to forget things. Nothing serious you understand, just small things, mainly of the “I must remember that” just to be ironic. A good example would be a story I might hear on the radio and want to pass on, or my mental shopping lists might not be as sharp as they used to be.

As a teenager, I was very involved in the Boy Scouts, and I remember vividly (another irony) that one of the ‘tests’ for a badge – which were very coveted – was for memory. The way to learn to get a good memory was to place a few items on a tray, memorise them, have the tray taken away and then write down as many as you could remember. As you got better, then you simply kept adding more items to the tray and repeated the exercise.

It works too!

I have always had a decent memory – I can remember really stupid things such as phone number in the UK 40+ years ago, the rego number of all the cars I have owned and directions to places. Another trick I learned was to use mnemonics to reference street names in sequence for example.

Names I do have an issue with; I can never remember the art of repeating the name back when someone introduces themselves and I think it is possibly too late to change that one now. But a new trick I did think of the other day seems to work in other areas quite well.

Back in the early days of the personal computer revolution, when memory was at a premium and developers fought for every single 1K they could get, a very neat program came out called “Sidekick” and this took advantage of a little bit of protected memory, allowing you to load a small notepad and calendar/diary/address book. (I have a theory that the reason many programs these days are so bloated is that developers no longer have to do this. They have all the memory they need and have therefore got lazy).

So what you ask? They are a dime a dozen these type of applications.

Not then (circa 1984). We only had MSDOS and 640K which was NOT multitasking – ie: technically only one program at a time could be running –  so this was a MAJOR breakthrough. Millions and millions of copies were sold, and this marked the beginning of, at the time, one of the behemoths of the software industry, Borland. Eventually Borland fell apart by trying to do what so many did – take on Microsoft. But that’s another story.

I got to wondering; could I train my brain to keep a small piece of my memory “protected” and make it available for easy recall. And because I knew in what part of my memory I stored this “stuff”, I wouldn’t have to rack my brains so to speak to find stuff I wanted to remember. Somewhat like putting your keys and wallet always in the same place if you like.

Early testing seems to indicate it works. The longer term is the true indicator of course.

I’ll keep you posted. If I can remember.