Everyday life in my Memory Palace

I went ahead and moved into my Memory Palace.  Figured why not?  At least I know where everything is there. 

It started with a plan to “Keep [my] Memory and Thinking Sharp with These 20 Everyday Activities” I read about that have been linked to reduced risk of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI).

MCI includes problems with memory, planning, language and attention which we are most ardently trying to avoid even though they are relatively subtle in comparison to dementia, which of course, we also eschew.

OK.  Good.  “Everyday” implies easy, routine, middle-of-the-road kinds of things that even the average schmo can work into her daily habits.  And, with any luck at all, she’s already doing them, thereby accounting for her sparkling presence in the household and around town.  

Feeling confident. 

Heck, I can probably do all 20 with little to no exertion!  I especially appreciate that considering I’m a founding member of the Lethargy for Procrastinators club.  Meetings whenever.

And, even though I am quite sharp already in the memory and thinking departments, as you now doubt have observed, I figured, why not go ahead and zip through some everyday activities that might further sharpen my considerable wit and hone my laser-like focus?

I mean, I can’t remember the last time I lost my car keys, or my car.  Really.  I can’t remember. 

I haven’t raced into a room only to stop short with a quizzical look in gosh knows how long.  But still. 

Here we go:

According to PsyBlog, new research published in the journal Neurology suggests that regularly engaging in arts and crafts, socializing and computer use during middle age may help preserve memory in later years. 

Hooray!  This is a perfect time for me to get started as I am middle-aged.  Exactly in the middle, in fact, presuming my life expectancy is 128.    

Yeah, that’s about right because the study asked 256 “seniors” (the new code word for middle-aged; 60 is the new 40, after all!) to report how often they took part in various everyday activities

Now get this:  At the start of the study none of the participants had memory or thinking problems.  Four years later, less than half of these everyday folks had developed MCI. 

I compared myself on the list of activities they participated in routinely that saved their brains:

Artistic activities including:  Drawing, sculpting, or painting.  Nope, no and uh uhn.

Crafts including:  Pottery, quilting, woodworking, ceramics, quilling and sewing.  Negatory down the line. 

But hey…  What is ‘quilling,’ anyway?  Who ‘quills’?  Benjamin Franklin?!

At first I thought they had repeated ‘quilting’!  Hahaha!  In a memory exercise!  They forgot they already said ‘quilting’ earlier in the same sentence! 

But of course it wasn’t quilting twice.  One of the ‘everyday’ activities is actually quilling.  It’s entirely different.  I looked it up.

Socializing included:  Socializing with friends, trips to the movies, theatre or concerts, book clubs and travel.

At last!  Activities that come naturally for normal people!  These are the very pastimes I suspected were doing me the most good.  I plan to redouble my movie-watching efforts.

But wait!  Using the computer can enhance a person’s memory and thinking too!?

Hallelujah!  Conducting web searches, online purchases (!), using the internet and computer games are all good for the noodle!  We’re having pasta tonight!

Finding myself already in the upper echelon of mental acuity, with excellent prospects for my dotage, I never-the-less pursued one more strategy for memory enhancement:  The construction of a Memory Palace.

This is a mnemonic device in which a person places objects she wants to recall in strategic locations around an imaginary palace she builds in her mind.  Easy peasy!  I’ve been constructing castles in the sky since I first read Cinderella!

Then, when this princess needs to remember the items on the list, or better still, when she wants to relive the care-free, youthful, skinny times associated with those objects, she simply closes her eyes and takes a tour of the palace!

It’s like Beach Front BargainHunt and the budget is unlimited! 


So I’ve built my imaginary Memory Palace and I’m thinking I’ll just live in it.  After all, it’s where I do my best work:  watching movies, socializing, making online purchases and of course, quilling.

Music soothes the old brain

Recently, I found myself in a room with a saxophone.

Apparently, I arrived in the midst one of those “common but mysterious short-term memory failures, [where] people find themselves in a room, without remembering why they ended up there.”

Precisely. 

So, there I was, a little bit breathless, and pondering:  Moments ago I was there, but now I am here.  With a saxophone. 

Why am I here? 

This is not an existential question.  I know why I am here.  I am here to make the world a better place.  Duh.  Everyone knows that, right? 

Nevertheless, in spite of my certainty regarding the meaning of life and my place in the universe, I was hard-pressed to know what-the-what I was doing in that particular room at that specific moment with an E-Flat saxophone.

And then there was the sax itself, staring back at me; also no doubt, wondering how we wound up together.  Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…!

Researchers say the doorway may be to blame. 

That’s right.  According to Gabriel Radvansky, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame, the very act of walking through a doorway may tell your brain since a new scene has begun, it should store prior memories, thereby causing strange memory lapses.  

"Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an 'event boundary' in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away… Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized."

OK.  Perhaps it is existential.  I think I forgot why I came into this room; therefore I am essentially still in the other room. 

Or, maybe these ‘event boundaries’ are my own personal wormholes whereby Morgan Freeman messes with me just because he can. 

In theory, mental event-boundaries are useful (so says Mr. Notre Dame) because they help us organize our mental timelines and remember not just where, but also when a particular event happened.

I get it.  It’s like when Mr. Plath asks me, for example, how long we’ve had Netflix and I piece together the answer by saying, “My hair was still long because the first one of those red envelopes got stuck in it when I thought I had to lick it to seal it and my hair got in the way.  And I thought we’d be able to get ‘Finding Nemo,’ which was about 2004; but of course we never could, which makes me wonder if we should go ahead and subscribe to HBO Go or one of those other movies services?”

It is patching into place memories – like passing through doorway after mental doorway, event boundary after event boundary, until he’s gone into another room wondering why he even asked me such a question in the first place.

But I digress.

I have crossed through a portal into a room which contains a saxophone.  To find out why, I need only retrace my steps, turning back the swinging doors of the event boundaries that brought me here.

Easy peasy.

Let’s see:  I had been wondering, after mistaking an old movie for a good movie, “What is that thing where you forget the ending of a bad movie and wind up watching the whole thing with a nagging suspicion that you’ve seen it before only to find, in the last unraveling of the plot, that you do remember the stupid ending of the thing and you just lost two precious hours of your life watching it again?”

So I went online to find out how to stop doing that annoying thing. 

I found an article at Live Science entitled “People with Dementia May Have Hidden Talents, Strange Case Shows.”

It told the story of a man in South Korea who was formerly meek and mild but got dementia and began saying what he thought at work without regard for the feelings of others.  Kind of like what’s-her-name at Sony Studios who said Angelina Jolie was a self-absorbed brat or whatever.  But then he started playing the saxophone and it made him nicer again.

And I thought, wow, that could be me.  The hidden talent part, I mean.


And I wound up in a room with a saxophone.