How’s your memory?
Mine is getting worse every year.
Did you know that a 60-year-old brain takes in information two to three times slower than a 20-year-old brain? As a result, what’s stored in memory is two to three times less clear and detailed. And by age 80, you may be five to eight times slower!
You can do something to slow the brain drain though. You can exercise your brain! Your brain is a muscle and, like all of the other muscles in your body, it needs a good workout regularly.
The first thing to do to increase your memory is to use it. Yes, just use it. Sometimes I think half my problem is that I don’t even try to remember things.
For example, I saw my personal trainer on Wednesday and made another appointment for the next Monday. It’s now Sunday and I have to text him to ask what time the appointment is. Not a big deal maybe but I did the same thing last week!
Get your brain off of auto-pilot and start making it work:
- Start “trying” to remember things. Song lyrics, details of a news article, ingredients in a recipe. Make a conscious effort to remember something every day.
- Learn something new. Learn a new game on your phone, a new computer program, a new card game or learn how to use a new piece of equipment – anything. This will get the neurons moving.
- Take a new driving route to a place you go to regularly. It sounds insignificant but doing this will trigger electrical signals in our brain and “wake it up”.
- Read a book. While watching TV and movies is a passive activity, reading actually requires your brain to work. If you can’t concentrate long enough to read a book, start with a newspaper article and move up to short stories but make sure it’s something with a story that you will be required to “comprehend”. It’s the comprehension that is the real work out.
- Start to memorize phone numbers! I can’t even tell you how many phone numbers I used to know. Now with my cell phone, I just push the name of the person I want to call. My mother moved a couple years ago and had to change her phone number from the only one I’ve ever known for her and I just realized – can you believe it! – I don’t know her phone number! Now, that’s bad.
- Play the memory card game. This is the game where an even number of cards are laid out face down and you turn them over, two at a time, looking for a pair. If you don’t find a pair, they get turned back down and you try again. I used to play this with my kids and I lost every time! There are online versions of this game now but for about $15, you can buy the old classic. Or you can just use playing cards.
Try this tray game to exercise your memory:
- Have someone (not you) put 15 items on a tray. Plain, ordinary items like nail clippers, a measuring cup or a fork. Fifteen normal items. Stare at the tray for 5 minutes trying to memorize what’s there. Then cover the tray with a dish towel and put it in an out of the way place.
- Go about your activities as usual and come back to the tray about an hour later.
- Try to remember what the fifteen items were. Give yourself a time limit to write down the ones you can remember. Ten minutes is good. Uncover the tray, how many did you get right?
I’m sure that many of the women reading this know this game. I know it’s one I’ve played at many wedding and baby showers over the years.
But I bet you didn’t know that this is a game used by doctors to test a person’s short term memory? I know this because I’ve done it. I had an accident when I was a teenager and they were concerned about a brain injury. So, to test for any impairment, I had to spend time doing fun puzzles with a therapist. I had to match things, build things, find things and memorize things.
The first thing she did at each appointment was bring out that tray of items and I would study it. Then at the end of the appointment, after completing all of the other exercises, she would bring it out again and I would have to list all of the items I could remember.
After all of the testing was completed, I was told that I got an above average grading on all except one.
The “memorize what’s on the tray” test!
(And I never won it at any of the showers either.)
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Image courtesy of cooldesign at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
