Do You Suffer From Long-Term Memory Loss?
I don’t remember…
(In case you think you’ve heard that before, maybe you have. It’s from the Chumbawumba song “Amnesia”.)
Actually, my long-term memory is pretty good. I’d even go as far as saying it’s very good. I can remember things that happened as far back as before I started school. I can remember my grandmother’s phone number, and she passed away when I was a young teenager. I can remember Chumbawumba song lyrics, and I haven’t listened to them in probably twelve years. I can remember catalog numbers of various things, such as 745928A or TM-T88IV.
But my short-term memory is horrible. I have a terrible time remembering to take my medicine. I’ve pretty much given up on taking it at the same time every day, and feel like I’m doing good to remember to at least take it every day. I often get up to do something, and by the time I get to the room I need to be in to do it, I forget what I was going to do.
I like to play sudoku, but I have a hard time with it because I forget which rows, columns and boxes I’ve already tried to figure out. So when I was playing online sudoku and saw a link to a site where you can play memory-boosting games, I clicked. The site is called Lumosity, and it has all sorts of brain games to play. It’s membership-based, but there’s a one-week free trial, so I thought I would give it a whirl.
Turns out my memory is worse than I thought. I figured I’d have an easy time with a game where you match faces to names, because I’m not too bad at remembering people’s names in real life. But I did horrible on it. As a matter of fact, I did awful on all of the memory games. And no matter how many times I tried them, I didn’t do any better.
I suppose it’s just as well. If it appeared to be helping, I would probably want to subscribe, and that’s not in the budget right now. So I guess I’ll just have to keep living with my bad memory.
