Tips to improve your memory
American organisation, the Foundation for Health in Aging, has released a new tip sheet offering easy-to-follow tips for maintaining your memory.
They recommend seeing your doctor if you snore at night and feel sleepy by day. These can be signs of sleep apnoea and the interrupted breathing during sleep can deprive the brain of oxygen.
Recent research suggests sleep apnoea may cause a part of the brain, mammillary bodies, to shrink.
Another way to improve your mind is to minimise multitasking.
Doing two or more things at once – like reading this and listening to the news at the same time – will make it harder for you to recall either later.
Here is a tip to remember several items if you don’t have pen and paper to make a list. Come up with a word or phrase using the first letter in the name of each item.
Let’s say you need to get lettuce, salmon, coffee, eggs, milk, and apples from the store. Create a sentence with words that start with the first letter of each item – L, S, C, E, M, and A.
You might try: “Lucy Saw Camels Eating Milk and Apples”.
Repeat that phrase to yourself a few times, or visualise (imagine) a girl (Lucy) watching camels eat a mixture of milk and apples.
Read the rest of the tips at www.healthinaging.org.
