Tips for a Better Mid Term Memory and a sort of Post Within a Post - or at least Notes for Another Post - on Coping with Pain

Short term memory is when you have to hold onto things for no more than a few minutes – for example, someone tells you a phone number and you have to rummage around before you can find a pen and paper. Long term memory is for stuff that happened a long time ago. ‘Mid Term Memory” is the term that scientists use, unless I just made it up, for stuff you want to remember for more than a few minutes – up to around maybe half an hour, or even an hour. But definitely not for the rest of your life.

Preamble to the Constitutional

You might be behind the wheel, at the gym, out jogging, taking a long shower like Lisa does, or just too lazy to get out of bed to write down the thoughts that are occurring to you. Or perhaps (but I doubt it...) you are deliberately choosing not to write your ideas down just to experiment and see if I was right last post when I said that memorizing creative thoughts as they come instead of jotting them down right away helps to keep them coming. But now you've gotten one idea too many and are in danger of losing them all. What to do?

What follows is based entirely on personal experience, first as a jogger who got lots of ideas literally on the run and now as a mostly bedridden guy who can’t get out of bed during the night to pee, let alone write.

“Great suffering opens our hearts and expands our bladder capacity.”

- Anonymous

Anyway, I’m going to use the word “bits” to refer to items to be held in memory, mostly because it makes me feel objective and scientific and like I might really know something about computers. I’ll give a small number of tips and one example, leaving out the important matter of rehearsal (repeating stuff to yourself so as not to forget it), or else this post will go too long.

Tips for Expanding Mid Term Memory

1. Find ways to organize bits that make them easier to remember. One good method is to organize bits into a sentence structure.

2. Reduce the number of bits you need for storing the information. Example: turn two bits that fit well together into a single compound word.

3. Give emotional meaning to bits, even if you’re faking it.

4. Let bits have multiple references.

An Example - And Why Not??

Recently I wound up with the following highly rhetorical question to reference ideas for an article on dealing with pain that had occurred to me during the night:

“Why not worse than doctor-focused sleep-stages?”

In addition to sentence structure, notice how I made two compound words, reducing that info from four bits to two. The italicized “not” is to show how I turned this nonsensical question into a (fake) impassioned plea, using emotion to make it more memorable.

Here’s the pain article information that the bits referenced:

Why not stood for “Ask ‘why not me’ instead of ‘why me.’”

Worse than stood for “Remember that there are those who are worse off than you rather than focus on folks who have an easier time with life.”

Doctor meant “Find one whose non-authoritarian – who’ll work with you rather than dictate to you.”

Focused meant “Focus away from the pain. If you can lose yourself in a movie great. If your pain is too much for mentally passive pleasures, do something more mentally active…”

Sleep was for “Try to get enough sleep and be willing to do whatever it takes. If meditation or other relaxation techniques won’t do it, turn to sedatives if need be, low-dose as possible.”

Stages meant that “Stages of grief, anger etc. are inevitable.”

A few more thoughts occurred to me after this, and I used additional methods for those. Example: I realized that I was overdue making a doctor’s appointment and let the word “doctor” have two meanings instead of the one.