Planning to Remember

Planning to remember: How to remember what you’re doing and what you plan to do

By Dr Fiona McPherson

www.mempowered.com

Published 2010 by Wayz Press, Wellington, New Zealand.

Copyright © 2010 by Fiona McPherson.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Wayz Press, a subsidiary of Capital Research Limited.

ISBN 978-1-927166-01-7

Why read this book?

What this book is about

What this book should do for you

1. How memory works and why it sometimes fails

Memories are made of this

Why people fail to remember

Know thyself: a quiz

2. Remembering to do things

Memory for future actions is different from other types of memory

Retrospective memory

Forgetting routine actions is not a failure of memory

3. Short-term goals and short-term memory

Working memory

Working memory and attention

Age and attention

4. Forgetting what you’re doing

Short-term memory problems are attention problems

Action sequences are why we make action slips

Common types of action slip

Situations when action slips are most likely

Have I done it already?

What makes some people more prone to absent-minded errors?

How to prevent action slips

5. Structuring your goals

A hierarchy of goals

Ordering your goals

The problem of suspended intentions

6. Circumstances that affect your remembering

Event-based retrieval cues are better than time-based

Is being too busy a valid excuse?

Wanting to remember is not enough!

Timing and complexity

7. Are some people better at remembering intentions?

Age differences

Individual differences

Review

8. General strategies for remembering intentions

Strategies people use

Effective strategies for remembering intentions

Mental strategies for better recall

Using environmental memory aids

9. Strategies for specific tasks

Remembering appointments

Remembering anniversaries and birthdays

Remembering arrangements

Remembering errands and chores

Remembering to take medicine

10. Your master strategy

Assessing memory tasks

Deciding on your memory strategies

It’s not all about memory

We fail to achieve intentions for many reasons

Believing in your abilities

The bottom line

Appendix A: Theories of prospective memory

Is prospective memory fundamentally different from retrospective memory?

Theory explains many characteristics of prospective memory

Conclusion

Appendix B: External memory aids

Context-based reminder systems

Appendix C: The coding mnemonic

Appendix D: Specific strategies for specific tasks

Glossary of terms

References

Chapter Notes

Other books by Dr Fiona McPherson

Why read this book?

What this book is about

Have you ever forgotten someone’s birthday? An appointment? To pick up the milk on the way home? To take your medication? To turn the stove off? Why you’ve come into a room?

Of course you have. This sort of forgetting is common to all of us — though some are more prone to it than others.

Research suggests that failures of prospective memory (which is what this kind of memory is called) account for at least half, and perhaps as many as 80%, of all everyday memory failures.

So should we worry about them?

Well, it depends. Prospective memory failures can be embarrassing, hurtful, and sometimes dangerous. Even at their best, they’re an annoyance. But because of the nature of this type of memory, a certain level of failure must be accepted. What’s important is where those failures occur. The purpose of this book is to help you reduce the number of failures and restrict them to those areas that are less important to you. I also hope it will help you become more relaxed about the failures you do have!

What this book should do for you

The world is full of self-help books, and despite the grandiloquent claims they tend to make, few of them change many people’s lives permanently. To truly benefit from such a book, you need to have very specific and focused aims, or all you’ll come away with is a feeling that you have learned something (what we might call the ‘feel-good’ factor). But if you can’t clearly put into words what you’ve learned and precisely how you’re going to apply it, your chances of lasting benefit are small.

So what should you aim to get out of this book?

Studies have shown that even month-long, intensive memory improvement courses rarely result in long-lasting memory improvement — because improving your memory isn’t simply a matter of learning some memory strategies. You also need to understand how and when to apply them. Those who are most likely to benefit from instruction in specific techniques are those who understand how memory works.

So your first goal should be to understand how this particular kind of memory works. Specifically:

How prospective memory is different from other types of memory.

Why prospective memory is more prone to failure than other types of memory.

When prospective memory failures are most likely.

The second goal, of course, is to learn effective memory strategies for dealing with, or preventing, these types of failures. In this book, you’ll:

Learn how specific tasks are different from each other.

Choose which specific tasks you wish to do better at.

Find out which strategies are effective for those particular tasks, and which of these are most suited to you.

The third goal is the least obvious. You need to acquire faith. Do you know what the most important factor is in determining how good your memory is? It’s not how smart you are. It’s not whether you’ve got good memory genes. It’s whether or not you use effective memory strategies. And whether you do that depends on whether you:

see a need (recognize your own failings), and

have faith that memory strategies actually work.

Recognizing the need is harder than you might think. Why doesn’t a student work harder to learn new information? Because they think they have worked hard enough! Why don’t people make more of an effort to remember a new name, a joke, a story they’ve just been told? Because they believe the memory is strong enough without that effort.

A lot of the time, they’re wrong.

Then there’s the question of belief. You’ve perhaps come across the problem in some other situation. Maybe in trying to lose weight, or managing your inbox, or raising the performance of your team. Whatever it is, did you have a little voice in your head that said, Well, this isn’t going to work. And chances are it won’t!

Even if it does seem to work initially, if you weren’t totally convinced in the value of your strategy, chances are you didn’t keep it up. Believing in what you’re doing is vital.

So part of my goal is to convince you that these strategies do work.

Let’s start with a quick run-through of the basics of how memory works (I explain them in more detail in my books The Memory Key and Perfect Memory Training).

1. How memory works and why it sometimes fails

Memories are made of this

Memories are codes

Memory is commonly portrayed as if it is a photographic record, as if everything we have ever experienced is faithfully recorded, blow by separate, exquisitely detailed, blow. But this isn’t true, and if you are to improve your memory skills you need to understand that this is not true. You need to understand that memory is not complete, and is not a replication.

Memory is selected.

Selected, twisted, constructed, and re-constructed.

And very personal.

I like to talk of memory codes rather than memories, because it constantly reminds us that memories have been created — that we have created them.

My memory code for cat is different from your memory code for cat, although both of us agree on what a cat is. Mine will include information about Pushti, a black part-Persian, with a lovely fluffy tail, that was the first family cat I remember. It includes memories of Dinah Pyewacket, my grandparents’ cat — a Siamese who had farex (a sort of baby porridge) for breakfast, and used to sit on my grandfather’s knee in the evening. It includes my opinions of cats (kittens are of course adorable, but I’m more of a dog person), my (limited and probably inaccurate) knowledge of Egyptian cat-goddesses, the kinesthetic memory of a cat’s claws, as well as general knowledge about cats — that they’re mammals, that they’re furry, that they come in numerous varieties, etc.

You and I will share much of that general knowledge, but it will all be colored by those individual, personal experiences of particular cats. If you have a cat of your own, then your memory code for cat will probably be dominated by those personal experiences. My personal experiences of cats are neither strong nor recent, and accordingly, in most circumstances, cat brings forth general rather than specific knowledge.

But circumstances are important. If I see a Siamese cat, I’m more likely to think of Dinah. If, as I did the other day, I see a cat sharpening her claws on a rug, I’m more likely to remember instead, Pushti, clawing our heavy living-room curtains to bits.

Memory is a network of codes. We create the codes, and whether or not we can find them again (remember them) depends on how well we constructed them.

Memory codes — an example

To give you the flavor of a memory code, here is an example of part of a network of memory codes.

This is part of a possible memory code for ‘cat’. Notice how ‘dog’, although a separate memory code, is included here, because of the strong association between cats and dogs. If you study the various bits of this network, you will realize how arbitrary the boundaries between codes are. My code for ‘Sid’ is presumably an entity in itself, and yet it merges inescapably with the more general code for ‘cat’, which itself is bound indissolubly with that of ‘dog’. Parts of the code — like ‘domestic pet’ and ‘mine’ — are clearly part of other codes; that doesn’t make them any less part of this one. Nor does it mean there’s a huge amount of repetition in the system.

What it does mean is that codes are collections of linked nodes, and strength of the links is all-important. And that strength will wax and wane over time, which means a memory code is not a static thing, but blown by the winds of context and experience.

In particular, remembering depends on the links we make between codes — for no memory code exists in a vacuum, and we find a memory code by traveling the trails formed by the links.

What makes a code strong?

Links that are recent will be more easily remembered, and links are strengthened through repetition. So a memory code that you retrieve frequently will be much more easily remembered than one that you only retrieve occasionally (to the extent that you don’t even think of it as remembering — the information is simply there when you need it).

Codes are also strengthened by being linked to other strong codes — which is why linking new information to information you already know well is such a good idea. To remember someone you’ve just met called Fred Bloggs will be helped if you link him in your mind to your cousin Fred or to your favorite blog.

How easily a memory code is found therefore depends on the strength of the memory code, which is affected not only by how often and how recently you have retrieved it, but also on the links you have made to other codes — which in turn depends on the particular information you have selected to encode (if you only encoded Fred, you wouldn’t be able to link to blog).

Improving your remembering is about building strong codes and strong links.

Why people fail to remember

Memory failures occur for a lot of reasons. But they don’t occur simply because the memory task is difficult. Nor do they occur because the person is incapable of remembering — although we are probably all guilty of berating ourselves or others as hopeless at remembering (birthdays / names / jokes / …).

But humans have a remarkable capacity for remembering and we all demonstrate that capacity repeatedly every day. Moreover, we all know at least some memory strategies that could help us remember.

The main problem isn’t that we have a poor memory, or that we don’t know how to help ourselves remember. The main problem is that we fail to realize we need help.

Recognizing when we need to use a memory strategy is the first and most important step in improving our memory.

Monitoring your memory

Monitoring your memory is an important — and often overlooked — memory strategy that underlies all memory skills. If you can’t reliably gauge when information is properly