Pay attention — and remember anything

Do You ever lose your car keys, phone or glasses and have to spend ages looking for them? These are small items and it’s understandable that they may get overlooked.

Your car, on the other hand, weighs over a tonne and is a huge lump of glass and metal. How can you forget where you left something that big?

It seems ridiculous, but most of us have done that at one time or another.

The most likely reason? You are absentminded! I’m not casting aspersions on your mental abilities. What I mean is that your mind is elsewhere.

When you come home in the evening you are likely to be thinking about what you’ll be having for dinner; maybe you are going out that night or you are thinking about your partner or the children.

You are almost certainly not thinking about where you put your keys down. At that moment it is unimportant and you pay no attention to it. A couple of hours later, or the following morning, however, and the location of your keys suddenly takes on great importance. You need to leave the house in a hurry but you’ve got absolutely no recollection of where they are because the memory was never stored in the first place.

Exactly the same thing happens when you park your car.

Every journey has a purpose. When you park, your thoughts will be on meeting friends, the shopping, the movie you are going to watch and not on where you’ve left the car.

The solution is to get into the habit of very briefly bringing your mind back to the present for a few seconds.

As you walk away from your parked car, pause and look back at it. Make a mental note of the surroundings. What landmarks can you see? Is it near a specific building or a certain tree? What shapes do you notice?

Because you are looking backwards, this will be your viewpoint when you return. If you give your brain the chance to register details of the scene, it will recognise them again when you return and help you locate your car. Follow the same process with your keys, phone or glasses.

As you put anything down, train yourself to stop and look at where you put it and actively notice the location. It only takes a fraction of a second to pay attention like this, but it could save you hours of stress later.

KEEP A MEMORY DIARY

Your memory on any given day can be hugely affected by many factors, such as lack of sleep, poor diet (or skipping meals), alcohol and stress.

So Sean Callery, author of the Collins Gem 5-minute Memory Workout (Harper Collins) recommends keeping a one- week ‘memory diary’ to pick out the sort of things you regularly forget, so you can pinpoint the weaknesses in your memory and identify what’s causing them.

At the end of each day jot down answers to these questions:

DID you wake up feeling refreshed?

DID you have breakfast? WHAT were the key events of the day? HOW good was your concentration at these? DID you forget anything important during the day? DID you use memory aids (say, diary notes or Post-its?) HOW stressed did you feel? DID you eat healthily? WHAT was your alcohol intake? WHAT time did you go to bed? AFTER a week you will begin to build a picture of how you are using your memory and the ways in which your lifestyle could be affecting its performance.

PRACTISE ‘NEUROBICS’

SOME neuroscientists believe you can exercise lazy, unstimulated parts of your brain through playing with your senses.

The idea is that by jolting your brain out of familiar routines, you force it to pull in reinforcements in the form of other senses — smell, touch, taste, sight, hearing — and so stimulate millions of neuron pathways that are not as fit as they should be.

Dr Lawrence Katz, professor of neurobiology at Duke university Medical Center in the u.S. (and co-author of Keep Your Brain Alive, with Manning rubin, published by Workman) terms these exercises ‘neurobics’.

These are simple exercises which involve one or more of your senses in a novel context, forcing you to rely on the others to do an ordinary task and so awaken new brain circuits.

The idea is to present your brain with unexpected experiences using various combinations of senses as well as your emotional ‘sense’ to put the unfamiliar routines together.

Try injecting a bit off brain-stimulating novelty into your mindless morning rituals by:

SHOWERING with your eyes closed ( try this only if your balance is good). use touch instead of sight to locate the taps and shower gel.

BRUSH your teeth with your non-dominant hand (so your left hand if you are right-handed and vice versa), this includes opening the tube and squeezing out the toothpaste. Then move on to brushing your hair and applying make-up with the ‘wrong’ hand.

LAY out your wardrobe the night before, then, the following morning, close your eyes and use only touch to get dressed.

WEAR earplugs to breakfast and experience the world without sound. Blocking a major sensory route like this forces you to use other cues to accomplish simple tasks, such as knowing when the kettle has boiled.

HAVE a completely different breakfast to normal, and vary your routine (get dressed after breakfast, not before).

PLAY WITH MONEY

BOOST the ‘touch’ parts of your brain by grabbing a handful of loose coins from your purse and trying to determine the different denominations by feel alone.

TRY THE TRAVEL TRICK

WHEN on a bus, train or being driven by others, close your eyes and use the speed, the turns in the road, or the sound of the brakes or people getting on and off to visualise where you are and what is happening outside.

MESS UP YOUR DESK

ARBITRARILY reposition everything on your desk and switch your watch to the other wrist.

Scrambling the location of familiar objects you normally reach for without thinking reactivates spatial learning networks and gets dormant parts of your brain back to work. It triggers a new series of instructions, which help build brain power.

GET GARDENING

WHETHER it’s a window box or an allotment, gardening is perfect brain training.

Your planning and spatial abilities are called into action as you decide which plants to put where, the direction of the sun on them and how much water is needed.

And you use all your senses, including feeling the earth, smelling the plants and tasting, say, sprigs of herbs.

ADAPTED by Louise Atkinson from How to train Your Memory, by phil Chambers, published by Bluebird.