tedcooke

Yes- the fact I am basically a loser with no friends.

Best tip: relentlessly find what's interesting for you about what it is you're trying to learn. By doing that, you'll recruit from your mind all the connections that make up your sense of the world's meaning, and so be able to connect new information with what's already there. That's the essence of memory.

Worst tip: buy into any personal narrative (which almost all of us share in some way or other) that you have a "bad memory". This is almost never true, and the reason we feel that way is more often than not a failure to appreciate that we remember (cf good tip) what we find interesting and a lot less of everything else.

Worth saying that this latter point is a good design principle for our minds: no point remembering something that's irrelevant, after all.

I only dimly remember my birth. I find it difficult, actually, to order childhood memories, and I have what we all have- namely "infantile amnesia" (love that term, reminds me of some of my friends after a night out), where there's basically no retained memories from the very first years of life.

My favourite, and I can't claim it's the first, memory from childhood, is my sense of astonishment when my dad explained that light enters the eye. I'd intuitively thought that my eyes went out and gathered the light.

For keys, one forgets their location for two interconnected reasons: a) the event of placing keys is not noteworthy (boring) b) we place them places without thinking about it, so conscious attention doesn't land on the act, so we forget.

The solution I've found works is to imagine your keys as, for instance, a set of miniature koala bears on a hoop. Feeling that they're alive, that they're vulnerable, means you pay that bit more attention, so recall where you left them (who'd forget where they left their pet koalas!). Another option is to play the sound of an explosion in your mind whenever you place them somewhere. Violence is great for memory :)

lol

Thank you for your question! It's a pleasure to be here.

I got into memory techniques when I was 18. I was in hospital with a crooked back, and, in an attempt to impress the nurses (as well as to pass the time- I was in a ward full of forgetful octogenarians), I decided to train my memory. Got a book by Dominic O'Brien, which led me to numerous other works, and with all the time I had, I was able to go pretty deep.

I'm happy to report that the nurses were not unimpressed, and it all wound up one evening with their sneaking me out of the hospital in a wheelchair to go to their local houseparties. Golden days.