I have severe ADHD and I frequently forget important details due to my poor working memory. This is causing issues at work. Because I am forgetful, I have to frequently go back and track what I currently am working on and what I need to do next. This makes me inefficient.
I was researching on how I could improve my working memory and I came across the book “Moonwalking with Einstein” by Joshua Foer. It gave me a lot of hope.
I tried some of the techniques like Memory Palace and Method of Locii and they seem to be working. But creating memory palace and using imagination is take some effort. I was wondering if anyone is available for coaching and for accountability.
Ideally, I would like to quickly remember highlights of a conversation in real time.
At work, I need to remember some details of the things I have worked on the day before. Usually, I draw a blank when anyone discusses with me some of the code that I wrote a few days earlier.
Even while playing ping pong I forget the score. I am always amazed when the guys I play with replay the game in their head and come up with the current score.
My questions basically are:
How long should I practice mnemonics before it becomes a second nature. Also, how much time should I dedicate to it per day.
Is it possible to remember important conversations in real time? Or will mnemonics only work on static items like list of phrases etc?
Is it helpful in arguments/discussions? I usually give up when arguing about something because I don’t remember all the important details about a specific event.
Scientific literature says that working memory cannot be improved. I am willing to do WHATEVER it takes to improve my mnemonic memory so it comes close enough to WM, if the possibility exists.
Glad you are trying to improve your memory.
I haven’t heard of any real memory coaches, but in a previous post, someone mentioned finding people from a third world country that go to world memory championship, and offering them money to coach you(over skype or a clone). Because dollars have a much greater value in third world countries, it would be comparably cheap.
As far as I know, mnemonics are never second nature unless you have a severe form of synesthesia. But they can become habitual, and quick to use. Time depends on how much you want to accomplish. Some people spend 10 hours a day, some once a week for half an hour.
I have used mnemonics in the past to memorize important points from lectures and such. Or prezi presentations.
Yes. You can use it to remember previous cases, important points you want to address, choice quotes, statistics, et cetera.
Working memory? As in, 7 ±2 chunks of information at a time? It probably can’t be improved, save better chunking, but you can learn to store that information very quickly into long term memory.
I think it probably could, but not as much for the obvious reasons. A person with ADD rarely gets much practice sustaining attention without medication. They learn not to pay attention. It’s not a negative trait, but we all get stuck in our ways until we make a concerted effort to work toward adjusting some aspect of our behavior or mentality. A person with ADD being stuck in his or her ways, as we all area, would entail paying attention to things for a relatively short period of time without and active and organized method of adjustment. The attention needed to memorize a deck of cards or a series of numbers is very intense. An hour of memorizing numbers would be impossible for a person with ADD to do with any reasonable degree of efficiency without serious training.
What that person could do using mnemonics is use several trials of very intense effort (with breaks in between) to see how many digits or cards that person is capable of memorizing before they realize that they have accidentally begun to think of something unrelated.
Take that number of digits or cards, add a few more the next day, and give it all you’ve got. If you were to increase the amount very, very slowly, you would undoubtedly be able to extend your attention span, if only for this particular activity at first. In time, when that person was able to memorize for two, three, or even four times as long as they could when they first started, I would think that that ability to sustain attention could be applied to other areas of life rather easily. Maybe only for bursts, but no “normal” person is able to sustain attention indefinitely either.