MEMORY SLUM

I had a lousy night’s sleep. I woke up about half past midnight and, for hour after hour after that, my mind was bombarded by random images and memories, which bludgeoned me into full consciousness. It’s almost as if, having opened up the “memory palace”, someone had decided to upturn the box and drop the whole lot on my head.

I suppose that I could have got up and tried to write it all down, a tried and trusted technique of getting it out of my head and onto paper so I stop worrying about forgetting it, but there was so much of it, I suspect that I’d have been up all night anyway.

Let me try to explain how I got myself into this predicament.

A couple of morning’s back, the Breakfast news people decided to take a fatuous and shallow look at the matter of memory. Oh, how they patronised, oh, how they implied that somehow, if we listened to their wise words for about three minutes, we too would never, ever lose our car keys ever again. The ironic thing, of course, is that with morning breakfast news broadcasts, they tend to repeat the same stories for three consecutive hours to cover the various times that people choose to greet their day, and so each time around it was almost as if they’d forgotten that they’d already told this tale.

Luckily, I only saw it the once.

Of the three minutes making up this particular segment, about a minute and a half of their allotted time was devoured by showing a long clip from a “Sherlock” episode to try and make it seem relevant to the telly-devouring zombies that they seem to imply we all are, using a plug for one of their own dramas to explain the blindingly obvious topic which they were talking about, just in case we moronic viewers didn’t manage to understand the concept of what a “memory” is I suppose.

The “memory expert” they then briefly interviewed had much to say in a very short time about the memory techniques that he himself had mastered to championship level, and was then cut off to go to some other item on geese or something. I don’t actually know. This is  not from a lack of memory, but because I left the room to go and do something more interesting instead.

Actually, it wasn’t all that interesting, because it was to go and put the empty tea mugs next to the sink, and, although in comparison I might be suggesting that this was actually a more interesting thing to do, it wasn’t really. I only thought I’d better mention it to prove that I did actually remember what I did.

People in glass houses and all that…

Before I went off and did that, however, the “memory expert” (he had a book to plug) touched upon the topic of “memory palaces” which seems to be a topic much in vogue at the moment, appearing as it does in quite a few books and dramas lately, of which “Sherlock” was merely only the most recent example, although it is a far older technique. It’s actually mentioned, for example, in the Thomas Harris “Hannibal Lector” book “Hannibal”, and I just used that very same method to remember the author’s name instead of looking it up on the internet like I would normally do. Visualise the bookshelf… move along to “Silence of the Lambs”… Top shelf… Right hand side… Ah! There you go: Thomas Harris!

Mine’s obviously more of a “memory library” but never mind…

However, one thing that he did suggest as being a good way of remembering the small things like where it is you’ve put things down, was the making of trivial moments memorable (and, of course, remembering to do this as you’re doing so…). So, for example, you might think of a firework exploding, or something equally bizarre or incongruous, to make the moment itself memorable when you, for example, put down your glasses or your car keys. As the man said, if you walked into your living room one day and found an unexpected clown juggling there you’d never forget it (and you’d probably run like hell), so you’re just using the same idea to help you remember more trivial things.

We are, after all, becoming a society that doesn’t have to remember stuff because we carry devices with us everywhere so that we can look things up. We no longer feel the need to retain knowledge and it has become something that is regarded as being unusual, which is why, I suppose, when “clever” people manage such feats on our televisions we can be extremely impressed, and why quiz champions sometimes really do seem to be quite extraordinary.

“How do you remember this stuff?” is a phrase that has haunted me over the years. I do because I do, and because I take the trouble to. In one job, it made my life easier to remember just where certain reference images were in the filing system, and so I became a useful resource for some of my colleagues who, it seemed, couldn’t retain that sort of stuff, or perhaps they just couldn’t be bothered to do something so banal. I still think that I have a lousy memory, but that seemed to be a useful thing to do precisely because it made the job a lot easier and I could never really fathom why other people didn’t do it. It was them choosing not to do it that seemed the more unusual choice to me.

I can still dredge up the most bizarre things despite never, ever having got the knack of absorbing and remembering names. That’s a huge flaw I have and people sometimes suggest that it displays a lack of interest in people, but, no matter what I do, names just don’t seem to sink in. Neither do happy moments unless I really take a moment and force myself to try and remember. Some holidays I have almost completely forgotten and I swear that if it wasn’t for certain photograph albums I have, most of my precious memories would be just so many melted icebergs. These days I have to truly try and force myself to try and remember a specific moment whilst it is happening, or else I can come away from somewhere like the Pyramids for example, without ever really feeling like I was ever really there.

Nevertheless, now that the rather fascinating topic of memory technique had been broached, however slightly, my mind was fully committed to finding out more, and what interesting stuff it is. Sometimes the seemingly chaotic layout of a “memory palace” seems arbitrary and random, but it does make some kind of sense to the owner, a bit like the madness that is our little house does. Although when you look around our tiny and chaotic hovel it resembles something more like a memory slum than a palace, but that’s just the way I seem to live. I like to occasionally claim that it’s because I know where everything is and “I have a system” which means that the status quo of clutter needs to be maintained, but I don’t think I’m fooling anyone with that one, am I?

Anyway, having been reminded of the notion of a “memory palace” and learned a few tips on improving memory, I decided to put it to the test and promptly visualised my fireworks and explosions as I went about my evening. I wonder quite what you do if you attach a firework image to absolutely everything that you want to remember, of course, but the three minutes I saw didn’t really cover that.

So off I toddled to jolly old Bedfordshire only to wake at midnight with my brain bursting with all sorts of long-forgotten memories to keep me awake through the long dark hours.

One of the things that I think we all dread is the loss of our memories and our faculties, but that night I could have quite happily forgotten everything if it meant a few decent hours sleep.