|
MEMORY-ENHANCING TECHNIQUES AND ELDER PEOPLE: REMEMBERING STORYLINES OR PLOTS
This technique is helpful in recalling any \"story,\" whether it is a book, the nightly news, a movie, or a lecture you just heard.
Remembering practically everything in order, though, demands special work. Here are the steps by which you will be able to perform this considerable feat of memory.
Step 1: Reduce the material to a manageable number of main points and list them. Encapsulating the content into an outline of six to twelve important ideas will vastly reduce the amount of material you must remember. Once you have the cues provided by memorizing your list, you will be able to \' \'remember\" or embellish on what the ideas mean and so have almost perfect recall.
Step 2: Make each idea as personally meaningful as possible. Ask yourself how points one, two, three, and so on apply to your life. Have you had particular experiences related to what I have said? Do you have emotional reactions to my points? Best of all, use the principle that forming an image helps. Can you get a picture in your mind illustrating each idea from something that has happened (or could happen) to you?
1. \"Older people are often anxious about their memories.\" Is this true for me? I remember that last week when we were together, my friend Jane confessed she worries about her memory all the time.
2. \"Everyone - including older people - misreads normal forgetting in a person over sixty-five as a sign of mental confusion.\" It\'s annoying that people my own age are their own worst enemies. Sometimes I make this mistake too.
3. \"Older people are not good judges of their memories.\'\' I\'d better think about depression, not that big D, dementia, the next time I worry for days about forgetting an appointment.
4. \"How does getting older affect our mental abilities?\" I wondered about that yesterday when my grandson ran logical circles around me in the political discussion we had.
5. \"It used to be thought that intelligence begins to decline early on. Now we know this is not true; older people are unfairly handicapped when taking IQ tests.\" How terrible that we were so unfairly judged! I can just imagine myself in a room taking the test next to my grandson. Me with my fifty-year-old eighth-grade education, he with his Ph.D.!
6. \"IQ tests measure book learning, not real-world intelligence.\" That explains why my friend\'s genius son has been such a failure all these years.
7. \"Tests of real-world intelligence will measure how we think about real-world dilemmas, not how well we produce academic facts.\" That seems reasonable to me. That type of test would be just my meat!
8. \"What does the standard IQ test tell us?\" I\'m interested in that too.
9. \'\'As we get older, crystallized intelligence - our sum total of knowledge - tends to increase.\" I can remember the word crystallized by thinking of a diamond, impervious to destruction and increasing in worth as the years pass.
10. \'\'As we get older fluid intelligence - our ability to analyze new information quickly - decreases.\" I can remember the word \"fluid\" by thinking of rapids coursing over a dam, rushing by and soon gone. It\'s true I don\'t think as quickly as I used to.
*35/159/5*
GENERAL HEALTH
|
