Can their craziness affect memory?

Psychology at this point is based heavily on guess work, so any studies that can provide conclusive evidence are greatly needed.

This link is to a study which is trying to determine the effects of having children on memory. This is an interesting topic because not only will it help explain why people lose their minds when they have children, it cnalso be applied to "the think zone."

This study is relevant because it basically studies how having to care for/think about other human beings affects people's memories. This study makes the huge assumption that parent's minds will be more cluttered than the minds of non-parents.

This assumption, while interesting and plausible, is not necessarily correct. Non-parents are more likely to have highly demanding jobs and therefore the possibility of just as much to think about. They do though have more time to think about their own lives because they do not have to deal with kids all the time.

To cut to the chase, if you have completed the 12th grade, you are eligible to participate in this study. I completed the study in about a minute. You only have until Thursday November 20th to help further the psychological community. So please take a minute out of your day.

Whether I like the Weather.

What do you say when you are bundling up on the way out of the house into sub zero weather? I always say, "I can't wait for it to warm up."

What do you say when you are sweating your butt off sitting in little more than your underware drinking Lemonade in the sweltering heat of July? I usually say, "When is it going to finally cool down?"

We all know in the back of our minds that it never stays that very ideal temperature of 70 degrees for more than like A SECOND, but somehow, many people just want to hurry along the seasons.

We forget that it is incredibly miserable on either extreme of the weather spectrum, but also, we always want it to be the other season. I was shocked how fast this happened this year. Almost immediately (on the first 20 degree day after a string of 70 degree days) I started hearing people complaining about how cold it was. But just days before, they had all been complaining about the insane heat. For some reason, people could not just appreciate the sting of the wind on their face even for one day because we know that it's only going to get colder and more biting. The effect is less noticable in the spring than in the fall because people love going outside without their coat, mittens, scarf, hat, and long underwear for the first time in months, but we do eventually forget the novelty and get sick of the heat.

I can't remember...

When I sat down to write for the first couple of weeks of this class, ideas just flowed and everything sounded new and fun, but I have started brain torming recently, and hit a major speed bump. After this many entries, I feel like I am repeating myself. It is getting hard to remember all of the posts, and to keep them all straight.

The organization of this blog itself doesn't help. It is by no means easy to look at a comprehensive list of all blogs. They are listed by month, and you can't really change how you can look at the blog history.

Basically, my memory has finally begun to fail me on this project. I am largely out of ideas and basically exhausted.

Is this too much?

According to the recent article, Surrogate Memory,Pal Pilots can be a huge help to people suffering from sever memory impairments.

People who have suffered strokes, have alzheimer's, or any other cognitive limitation can benefit from the modified palm pilot developed at Baycrest. At Baycrest, people with cognitive impairment take lessons in how to use their palm pilot until they (with their poor memories) can no longer maybe remember how they learned how to use the machine, but they still know how to use it. This is called procedural memory, and works sort of like riding a bike or walking.

The people then need to get in the habit of putting everything they need to do into their palm pilot. The reminders can be easily programmed at any time for any time, and then, when it is time for the person to do something, the palm pilot beeps and they can look at what they need to do.

Great right... Yeah, until they make a mistake. If a person says, "I don't have time right now, I'll put the event in later" chances are they will forget about putting the event in their palm pilot, and thus forget the event. Also, what happens when the person is told drive to an appointment, and they get in the car and can't remember what they did with their keys, or in the case of Alzheimer's Disease, they can't remember what they need to start the car. Then in the process of looking for their keys, they have to wander the house, and maybe bump into a book they were reading and just sit down and read never thinking again about the appointment. And what happens when they look at the date the doctor wrote on the appointment reminder card and put the appointment on say the 16th instead of the 6th?

Palm Pilots are a step above an day planner because they can actually remind you when something needs to happen, but I wonder how effective they would be for someone with severe cognitive impairment. There are so many steps in between being told that you have a doctor's appointment and actually arriving there that too many things can go wrong.

Clutter

When there are so many things happening in a person’s life that they can’t keep them straight, I call that brain clutter. Sometime, classes mush together until you accidently don’t go to class because you remember two of your teachers saying class was canceled, but don’t realize until the next class that the one you showed up for is the one that is canceled, not the one you skipped. OOPS!

The best way to get rid of brain clutter is to do less, but since we can’t very well do that, it is important to make it as easy on your brain. Try to focus on one task at a time, and once it is completed, start on the next one. I have determined that trying to plan ahead too often is also a sure fire way to make your head blow off. If you constantly plan ahead, you have a million projects/ideas/goals that all float freely around in your head. Don’t let them in, and your brain will function much better. Don't over think things.

On the tip of your tongue

While writing, a very common phenomenon is that you know the exact definition of the word you are looking for, but cannot get the exact word out of your mouth. You babble nonsense words to yourself that start with the letter you think the perfect word starts with in the hopes that you will stumble on the correct sound to trigger your memory of the perfect word.

You know that there is only one perfect word that could possibly make your paper awesome, so you sit there talking to yourself trying to find it. When your brain is insufficient, and you feel like you are banging your head on the wall, you ask your roommate, “what is the word that means _____and sounds like ____... Help me." The next step is going to the thesaurus and trying to look up the words that are close, but that rarely works either.

The really frustrating thing is that after you choose the closest word, and after you have printed out the paper, while you are standing in front of the printer or putting the staple in the top left hand corner, you remember the word and smack yourself in the head and forget about it because in the end, the other word got the job done just the same.

Drawing a Blank

Have you ever been thinking about something and then suddenly, the precious little thought that was running through your head is frustratingly GONE! It’s like waking up from a dream and knowing that it was a wonderful dream, but having no idea what about the dream made you so happy.

There are many possible explanations for why these thoughts flee our heads. It could be because you suddenly think of something else on a tangent off of the original thought that drives the original thought out of your head. I was recently working on a group project, and we were trying to cover so many different topics all right after one another that we were getting very confused. A couple of times, one of us would say something that we thought should be included in the paper, and then someone would ask us to repeat the sentence and the recurring response was, “I honestly can’t remember what I just said…What are we talking about again?”

We were trying to do too much too quickly, and it all got jumbled together in one big confused thought. After a while, we would have to take a break because after 6 hours of working with the same group of people, everybody’s brains feel like mush, and mush is really bad at math.