For a long time while following the process of remembering every day that passes, I had a policy of not keeping a diary and not making notes. I thought it would be good for my discipline to rely on my memory alone.
True, I would sometimes have to look through photos on my phone or emails with travel details to help me recover the images for particular days if I got stuck, but generally the mental process alone worked.
Prior to starting this journey, I had been a good journal keeper, not writing every day, but filling in the gaps whenever I picked it up. A few years in, I wrote my missing journals retrospectively, using the recollections my memory tags gave me.
Then in 2017, when my mother's Alzheimer's progressed to the point where I returned home to help my father and sister care for her, until that was no longer possible at home, I began to keep a diary of what was happening. The purpose was to learn what did and did not work in responding to her fears when she did not know us - and did not believe that she had a husband and children - and was scared of strangers in her house.
I have kept that going and write at the top of each page a prompt for the image for my memory tag.
This has had a downside. This year, I have fallen out of the habit of reinforcing the tags for the recent month with a review morning and night, and selected days from the past 6 months. I've told myself I can pick up my diary and catch up. To some extent that has worked, but it is not as effective as when I stuck to my routine.
It means it is somewhat harder to recall every day of recent months than the days from 2012, my first full year of this process. Yet, I suspect without the diaries, I would be lost by now.
Hey
ReplyDeleteYour blog has inspired me to start a memory project similar to yours.
The only thing I found after reading through your experience is that maintaining a mental calendar with pinned memory tags a largely time consuming effort.
The system i thought up is to use Google sheets as my "memory palace" where I'll create tags for each day and have short description of the day as a way to link my visualised memory tag to the dates.
I figured that by having it exist in a digital world I can create more tags per day, so I created a morning, afternoon and night tag as well for each day. This way I can capture more of the richness of life.
As I learnt from your blog, the most important and challenging part is the review process especially after several years.
So I decided to use a self made "spaced repetition algorithm" (based on Dominic O'Brien's rule of 5) where I set a rule for myself to review, today, yesterday, exactly 1week ago, 1 month ago, 3 months ago, 1 year ago for every year for last 10 years (hopefully I make it that far) and once a decade for each decade
By doing this I hope this review is minimum effective dose required to remember tags. I've done an off hand calculation and worked out if I were to live for another 100 years I would only need to review 25 days each day to maintain it (I hope I'm correct but only time will tell :))
The beauty of sheets is that I can see my life in a 2d layout nearly at a glance.
I've already prefilled out all the future dates for the next 100 years to fill in.
Each sheet represents a decade with the years moving down the column and months moves across the rows.
Your story has inspired me to start this project and I hope others can use a system to record their own lives as well.
Thank you.
Thank you for your comment. Please keep us updated on how your approach works.
ReplyDeleteWhen I began - nearly 10 years ago now - I had the hope that this process might develop hyperthymesia, the ability a very small number of people have to remember every day without memory tricks.
That hasn't happened, but I continue. It is still rewarding - if not more so with the memory tags that have been reinforced stretching back 10 years.
Though it takes some time to do the reviews, it is only a small fraction of my day and I am certain it is beneficial to my mental health to think about this wide range of experiences, not just those that come to my mind unbidden.
It's only been 5 days so far what I found was my days feel a lot longer. Before doing this project a week passing by felt like it happened a day ago.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that adding more memory tags per day results in time feeling slower.
It's already been of great benefit for me doing this so far, I can see perspective better and make better choices now in my own opinion. An added bonus is that negative situations that happens to me is another opportunity to add to my memory tags. Having 3 tags for a day means I can see that negative situation as a small thing in the overall picture.
One idea I had with this project is I can use my memories to write my own autobiography. Which I can give to my children to read and pass down through the generations.
Hopefully I can have my kids do this project as well from a young age and they can write their own autobiography to pass down.
Anyways these are all dreams anyway and its too soon to say anything lol.
I'll try to keep you updated.