I would like to be able to remember every day that passes

General Memory Chat
,
61

I have to say, reading through this thread has been endlessly fascinating to me. Something that I’ve been wanting to do for years but have never set aside a time to actually do is to, at the end of every day, just run through it start to finish in my head. There’s a progression of events that I think I lose when all I remember are snippets of things scattered randomly throughout.

I’m going to start doing that. Just sitting down every evening and running through the day. Then maybe run through the week on the weekends or something. I think that would be cool.

I’m also going to definitely check out that blog post. Thanks for inspiring me, Lembran. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
62

I recently watched this video over at ‘Quantified Self’ and it reminded me of the ongoing experiment forged here.

http://quantifiedself.com/2014/07/steven-jonas-memorizing-daybook/

1 Like
63

Well done to you! The amount of dedication alone should be applauded. I think I might do the same but only for the days where things happen as most of my days are the same stuff; come home from school, csgo, study for a bit, sleep. Do you feel that your normal memory has improved? Also, have you had any funny moments with this when you have either tried to explain to someone what youre doing or have reminded someone about a date? love to hear!:slight_smile:

1 Like
64

Hi DylanScanlan,

Sorry for the delay in responding to your questions.

My normal memory has improved in two ways. One is that I use the memory tags to retain details that I want to remember. It functions in this way as a memory palace, not just for remembering the days of my life, but other things, like people’s names, how to identify trees and birds, routes to places etc.

Secondly, I do think my memory has generally improved, though I’ve not looked at this in any objective way. It may be due to practice in retrieving images that have eluded me at first when I run through days on my mental calendar.

I’ve explained to very few people offline that I am doing in this experiment. But I do often surprise people by being able to remember events and facts, then name the date and what was happening on surrounding days. In fact, rather than saying I remember because of following this process, I tend to say I remember because it was the day something happened, or the day after.

As well as surprising people, I am also often surprised by how far out my family and friends are in recalling when something happened - often they will be years out. I don’t feel superior, though, because that is true for myself for events before 17 December 2011.

I don’t recall any funny moments in particular. Which just goes to show that I don’t remember everything, only what I make a point of including in the mental images as memory tags and the memories these trigger.

3 Likes
65

My refresh technique collapsed again at the end of April 2016. I decided to take some time off recalling the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags. However, I soon missed the perspective remembering every day that passes gives me on life. During stressful times, the thoughts that pop into my mind might not be that helpful, which happened to a greater extent while I had stopped this process.

When I revisit events in past calendars, I am reminded that all things pass, that most days are happy and the strength I have found when I needed it.

My reviews of past days are structured, but the events and moods that they pull up are essentially random. Some days are great, some terrible and many in between. So I see the rich tapestry of my life without dwelling on bad days or escaping into happier times. I returned to reviewing past days earlier than I intended for the grounding it gives me. I write about this more here:
http://lembransation.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/withdrawal-and-perspective.html

When I did return to reviewing past days, I found I could not return to the same method. My refresh technique has changed again. Partly due to the number of days and partly down to the confidence I have gained in this process, it is now much freer and based on choosing one particular year to explore over a period of time. More on this topic here:
http://lembransation.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/roaming-free.html

1 Like
66

Another change to how I refresh the images pinned to my mental calendar to cope with four and half years of remembering every day that passes.

Each day I take one year and recall the images for an 8-day window each month. Today is the 16th, so I recall 16th to 24th of each month. The first day and the last day of this window are the same. From this day, I can easily find the start of the window in the next month now that I am familiar with the patterns of the months.

A longer window reinforces the familiarity of the landscape of the year. An 8-day window gives me 8 days to complete the review of all the years completed so far (I have until the 24th of this month). So I can easily take a day off or take more than one day to recall the images for a particular year.

As previously, every image will be recalled, even if only for a fraction of a second, each month. I find this essential to stop them fading or being lost.

This method has the potential to expand to cover 8 years without becoming too burdensome. More details here:
http://lembransation.blogspot.com.br/2016/07/weekly-block.html

1 Like
67

Thanks for sharing and continuing to share your insights and efforts!

1 Like
68

The Rio 2016 Olympics have just finished and figure in many of my memory tags for this period.

The same is true of the London 2012 Olympics. China 2008 is a blur lost in the mist as it was before I began this process.

I’ve written a blog post about the memory tags for these events - and also how amazing it is that I know how long four years is between Olympics as I can travel over every intervening day on my mental calendar.

Writing the blog post raised a question: should I add information to old memory tags?

Mo Farah won the 5,000 metres for the second time on 20 August 2016. I remembered watching him win the first time in London, but had to look up the date (11 August 2012). My memory tag for that day was totally unrelated to the Olympics - it was a bike ride.

I’ve added the memory of Mo winning in 2012 to the memory tag. I had the memory, but had not pinned it to the calendar. I make the rules and I’ve decided that is allowed.

What I don’t do is make false memories by creating an image for something I don’t remember, but other information tells me must have happened. I don’t have a clear memory of Mo winning the 10,000 metres in London. Having checked, I now know Super Saturday when he did it (alongside 2 other Gold athletics wins for Team GB) was on 4 August 2012. Again my memory tag is something different. I can’t quite remember if I saw these wins live or later. I was out that evening and suspect I saw the news when I returned. I’m happy to add the fact it was Super Saturday to my memory tag - they often serve for coding useful information - but not a memory of watching the win when I don’t actually remember it.

A proviso to this is whenever I have lost an image in reviewing those pinned to my mental calendar, it has eventually come back to me. If the memory of me watching Mo’s 2012 win in the 10,000 m does come back to me then I am confident I will know it is genuine. That, in itself, will be an interesting development.

The blog post is here:
http://lembransation.blogspot.com/2016/08/remembering-olympics.html

1 Like
69

Why I can’t understand …that something called mental calendar ??
can any one explain ?

1 Like
70

Hi Badr4sudan,

Thanks for your question. I have covered this in the thread, but you can also find the description on my blog here:
http://lembransation.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/my-mental-calendar.html

Basically, I literally visualise a month-per-view calendar with the images pinned to the days of it. In fact, I see these laid out in a line of pages before the year in large flaming numbers to which they relate.

Over time, I have developed pronounced spatial awareness of this calendar and feel like I am stepping from one day to the other as I go through my daily refresh technique, which I find is essential to stop the images from fading. This technique has changed over time, as described in this thread and in my blog.

3 Likes
71

Hahaha, I love it!
I do it as well with my memory tricks but I’ve never heard it before.

I tried to remember the passing days as well, but overall I didn’t quite succeed…

I used the Wardrobe method, but the conflicts became too big passed the first month.
I planned to make the transition to a memory palace instead of the Wardrobe, but I never took the time :frowning:

I didn’t even try your technique of simply visualizing the Calendar.
I’ve never used calendars much so I figured it wouldn’t work for me, but seeing that you still give updates makes me want to give it a try.

Also,
my first 3 weeks were the best days I had in more then a year.
So it was easy to pick something to remember…
But then I fell back in some serious boring days of daily routine and work, and on top of that I passed the 30 mark, so I had 2 or 3 “15th of the month” and so on…
All that together, I really need to work on it soon if I don’t want to lose my last 3 months!

What you just said might save it for me :

I wished I’d be more aware of what happends in the world each day.
And I’m just too busy with work and all to have memorable events every day. Maybe I’ll just replace My events with some random world event on the days where I didn’t do anything special…

Btw, here’s a few posts I made on Reddit to keep track of my experience with the system.

I’m looking forward on hearing more about your experience!
there’s a few posts on this Thread which I haven’t read yet, I’ll read that as well later ^^

1 Like
72

I have wanted to do something like this for a while now, but with a twist.

First of all I have no real need to remember facts of what happened everyday. I keep a journal for that reason, which also functions as a sounding board for me to work out problems. Doing it all in my head is unnecessary.

However, I want to remember personal achievements each day. For a long time I kept a journal of personal achievements for the day, no matter how small and “magic moments”, again, no matter how small. I want to start that up again.

Coming up with an image for the day is easy. For example, it snowed today for the first time this year and my new chessboard arrived, so I visualize unpacking my chesspieces in the snow. How to link that to January 12th seems impossible. I can’t do the calendar method that Lembran does. The images are too similar. I’m not sure how a journey would work, as I would be skipping some days, and I would eventually need 300+ loci.

Anyone have any other ideas for remembering calendar dates without just picturing a calendar? I anticipate wanting to remember 20-25 days out of every month, knowing the date, and remembering these “forever”. Would a memory palace work? A 2017 wing, with a January room, 4 walls become 1 week, with a table in the middle for the 5th week and so on?

1 Like
73

Hello,
Two threads may inspire you if you want to use the “art of memory” techniques for this purpose :

1 Like
74

Hello everyone,

I’ve found this forum by chance while looking for some information about “remembering one’s day everyday”. After reading about people with hypermnesia and about memory techniques in a psychology course, I thought it should indeed be possible to remember one’s days in details if enough attention and effort is put into it.

What I’ve started doing is a bit different from what is described here, but close enough so that I can ask my questions here I believe. A few days ago I started to spend about half an hour every evening, just before falling asleep, remembering the details of my day, and pinning it to my mental calendar (which I have always had for important dates). I’ve been amazed to realize that most of my day was still there in the evening - that, if I wanted to, I could have spent hours living my day a second time with almost all of its details. After the day review I quickly check back the previous days to see that I can still remember the main events for each date.

The question I have is linked to sleep. I haven’t found any scientific publication about it, or any publication at all for that matter, and this is why I am asking it here because maybe some of you have had similar impressions and would like to share them.

Sleep and REM have been shown to be linked to sleep, and may be some kind of process by which the brain passes memories from the daily buffer to long term memory. What happens when I do these day reviews is that I do indeed get REM (though I’m not sleeping; but this is quite logical if you consider that I am looking at the landscape in my head, in the first person, a bit as if I was in a dream - I am actually looking at everything that was around me during the day, not remembering things through words). But then, after I finish my review, I feel quite nervous. I wonder if it is caused by the quite long intense focusing effort, or if it’s because I’ve “burdened” up my consciousness with too many images and thoughts (a bit like when you’re anxious because you’re thinking about ten things at a time).

Any way, I find it harder to fall asleep because of this nervous feeling (which is not very nice), but then surprisingly I’ve waken up earlier (without alarm clock), and with much more energy than usual. I tend to need about 9 hours of sleep in order to wake up spontaneously and feel that I’ve had enough rest, but in the past few days it was more about 7 hours 30 (which would generally make me quite tired the whole day, but not these days). Again, I don’t know whether this is linked to some other factors in my life or whether this has to do with the fact that the “memory consolidation” process has partly been done before actual sleep.

I know that I’m only starting this experiment and that only time will tell what effects are caused by the memory review, but I was wondering if any of you has experienced something similar. Also, because it made me feel nervous, I’ve considered dropping the experiment completely, thinking that maybe this was something not so healthy and that the purpose of sleep might be precisely to dump the non-important details and keep only the most important things available in memory, process against which I’m going with my experiment.

The idea of remembering only one image seems less challenging, and I will try that (one or a few images). But if any of you has something to share about feeling nervous after a few minutes of intense consolidation, or about the link with sleep, I’d be happy to read it !

75

Actually, in pratique, a simple way to do it is to write a journal like a game. Every night you have to write answering the question " What am I did today" so in the next day you gonna read it and it improves your memory over time you are just telling to your mind what’s important.

Here I’m blogging about it actually so you want to read some the e-book http://aprendafalaringles.com.br/best-books-on-memory-improving/

76

Thanks for the comments. I’ve just written a blog about adding in a new review of past days to my refresh technique that stops the memory tags fading on my mental calendar. Each morning I recall the tag for the same date for each of the past five years, starting in 2012, plus the following day. I missed the birthday of a friend’s child recently so want to remember the tags for each of the past 5 years. If I had been doing this I would have remembered his call to tell me his daughter had been born.

I don’t see how this would be possible without a mental calendar to walk over. I can easily locate the days from one year to the next. There are tags on 1894 days from when I started to today. Maybe more experienced memory practitioners than I could handle such a long chain of events in a memory palace setting, but for me the calendars work fine.

I don’t know that it has affected my sleep at all. Generally it is very calming to do my final review as I drift off to sleep, running through just the past month, so it helps me relax. Other than that, I’m not sure.

However, as I wrote in my blog today, there are other effects that are only becoming apparent now. The person I was five years ago is not the person I am now. I travel back not only through time and space when reviewing past days, but through the layers that construct me. I’m not a stranger to myself, but the younger version is different.

On the monthly cycle of these visits across the years, I see my younger self recede, yet it is my present self that is moving forward. The past is set in stone. It is the present me that has changed and with it my perspective on the past.

Here’s the blog: http://lembransation.blogspot.com/2017/02/across-years.html

1 Like
77

I’m going to resurrect this thread again because it’s so fascinating and I hope others will take the time to read it. I just read it for the first time a few days ago, and then read some of your blog posts Lembran.

I’m wondering if your mental calendar looks something like this continuous calendar app on the web where the months connect with each other like puzzle pieces? It seems this arrangement would help with continuity. From what I read of your posts it sounds like you used to have all the monthly calendars on a rolling drum but now they are all on a flat plane extending off into the horizon.

I would like to do something similar to what you’ve done but not sure yet if I should keep everything in one plane or separate it more for easier indexing in the mind. Regardless the fact that you’ve remembered something from 6 years of consecutive days is very inspiring, not only to do something similar but also to tackle other large-scale memory projects. Thanks!

78

Just checking in to say the experiment continues.

I passed the six-year mark on 17 December 2017. I’ve also had to change the way I refresh the images pinned to my mental calendar as memory tags.

There’s an update here:

http://lembransation.blogspot.com/2018/01/six-years-later.html

2 Likes
79

first time I have noticed this thread. A wonderful use of mnemonics in real life. Well done.

80

Very interesting experiment! Here is the exact opposite of what you are trying to do! LOL…

https://cloudtweaks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/cloud-computing-david-fletcher.jpg

1 Like