In previous posts, I have tried hard to provide advice for seniors, "life hints" that will help us to overcome some of the debilitating effects of growing old, like forgetting our car keys in the freezer (it really kills the little button battery in the car-key remote).
Although we all have our physical aches and pains, nothing worries us more than losing our mental acumen. Being paralyzed from the neck down is a terrible thing indeed, but being paralyzed from the neck up is potentially even worse.
"What tricks do you have to help us avoid these common pitfalls in our daily lives," you ask?
Thank you for asking that question, because if you had not, I would probably not have anything to write about today.
Inevitably you will forget where you have left something – the keys in the freezer, your car in the mall parking lot, your spouse at the shopping center – and spend a lot of time even trying to remember WHAT it was you forgot, not to mention WHERE it was that you forgot it.
Thankfully, once again, science has come to our rescue and not a moment too soon! Research shows that by talking to yourself, you can actually help to improve your short-term memory. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin divided people into two groups and had some of them "talk to themselves" while the others did not.
These are not random conversations with yourself that we are talking about here.
The scientific research does not suggest that it will help you to blabber vitriolically to yourself about how you want to wring the neck of the dog next door who pees all over your garden and kills your roses!
No, this is strictly a strategy for helping you to find lost items. The group that wandered around repeating the name of the thing they were looking for was faster in retrieving that item than the group who searched in silence.
Leaving aside the question of how old the members of these groups were (if they were seniors, the silent group could have forgotten what they were looking for), the "talkative" group showed a marked difference in how quickly they were able to find the things they were hunting. The items were especially easy to find for this group if they were "characteristically colored". "Items like bananas, grapes and Cheerios had stronger associations with the chitchat than those with less specific colors, like Jell-O and Pop-Tarts*."
So to tie things together here into some cogent advice for seniors, there are a couple of important things you can do to make finding things in your life easier.
1. Say the name of the item aloud as you look for it. So as you shuffle up and down the rows of cars at the mall, repeat out loud to yourself, "Car... car... car... car...." This will help you to find it, hopefully before someone calls an emergency medical team.
2. Make sure that all the things you tend to misplace have "characteristic colors". This means that you want to get your husband to wear loud Hawaiian shirts and paisley, polyester pants (Maybe THAT is why a lot of seniors wear loud clothes; they instinctively understand this psychological principle.) When you potter through the shopping center saying, "John... John... John... John...," the "characteristic colors" will form a nagging image in your mind. Ignore helpful bystanders who point you to the restroom.
I hope these suggestions will improve your daily life and make it easier for you to live out your silver years without losing things so frequently.
Now... what was I looking for before I started this article? Oh yes... wine... wine... wine... wine....
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*Further research might reveal that this technique could also be an aid to dieting, since the unhealthy food items mentioned, Jell-O and Pop-Tarts were harder to find.
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