Tag Archives: memory

Does multi-tasking affect your memory?

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“FIRE” — Jarome Iginla by Mimi Stuart ©
Live the Life you Desire

What happens to your memory when you multi-task? It turns out that texting or phone interruptions mingled into face-to-face conversations weakens your memory. Fragmented attention does not allow you to focus on any one thing long enough to code it into your memory well. Poor memory leads to making frustrating mistakes and wasting time. Research shows that a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to complete a given task and will make 50% more mistakes.

More importantly, fragmented attention does not make the person you’re talking to feel valued. Plus it’s simply rude!

Focused attention is essential to working memory. Neuropsychologist John Arden explains that, “if working memory is impaired, long-term memory will experience a famine of new information. If the road to long-term memory through working memory is blocked, the ‘supplies’ or memories can’t get through.”

If, for example, you are texting during dinner while conversing with your family, your focus will be fragmented and your working memory jeopardized. When you are distracted, you forget the detail of the story being told — your working memory hasn’t been encoded into your prefrontal cortex yet. So you have to ask, “What were you just talking about?” after glancing at a text.

Paying attention is key to good memory. Arden recommends the following to cultivate memory:

1. Resist having your attention fragmented.

2. Schedule social media, text messaging, and phone calls to specific times of the day, when others are not wanting your attention.

3. Focus your attention on each task until it is completed. With better prefrontal cortex activation, your working memory will function well enough to code information into your long-term memory.

It pays off considerably to pay full attention to the work at hand and the people around you — it enhances your memory, makes you more effective, and improves your relationships and interactions with others.

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Reference and great reading: John B. Arden’s “Rewire Your Brain: Think Your Way to a Better Life.”

“Your memory is too good!” Forgetting or Directing our Focus?

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"Collecting Moonbeams" by Mimi Stuart
Live the Live Desire

Sixty Minutes recently did a story on people with “autobiographical memory”—those who can remember almost every day of their lives, such as what they had for lunch on April 7th, 1982. Each memory is as vivid as if the event occurred yesterday. For people with such an extraordinary memory, “The past is never dead, it is not even past.”

~William Faulkner

Avoiding remorse

What struck me most was one woman’s comment that this ability motivated her to live every day of her life in such a way that she could live with her memories—memories presumably about the way she treated people and the choices she made. The fact that very little would be forgotten meant that she wanted to minimize regrets and remorse, which would always stay with her.

Is it true that the person with a clear conscience has a poor memory? I don’t think so. Memory seems to have little to do with how a person treats others. With or without a good memory, a person either has or lacks compassion for others. With or without a good memory, a person can benefit from living every day so as to avoid regret and remorse.

Directing our focus

Diane Sawyers asked these gifted people whether it was hard to have relationships with others, as their relatives found it difficult to ever win an argument about facts with them. They didn’t think so. They did stop arguing over facts though. A lesson for everyone might be to stop arguing over facts and get to the underlying reason for the argument.

How about the rest of us, many of whom can’t remember much more than the highlights and the low points of our lives? Is it a blessing to be able to forget?

It depends. As Joyce Appleby put it, “Our sense of worth, of well-being, even our sanity depends upon our remembering. But, alas, our sense of worth, our well-being, our sanity also depend upon our forgetting.”

Rather than clinging to our memories or trying to forget, we can improve life and relationships by directing our focus. By learning from our past experiences, we can concentrate on the positive within ourselves and others. Whether we remember all the detail of our lives or only the drama, it’s up to us to decide what to focus on.

by Alison Poulsen, PhD

Read “Always being right: “That’s not what I said.”