Irresponsibility can be an addiction as strong as drugs or alcohol,

How many times have you been unable to remember a face, a gesture, a moment that was an important part of your life?

Our memories are stored in different sections of the brain through a complex process of segmentation. For example, visuals are stored in the occipital cortex, but that doesn’t imply sounds, smells, or tastes… all of which are stored in different areas of the brain, the result is a fragmented memory that is hard to access.

As a species, we have recognized the importance of having some kind of external registry: Historians dedicate their professional lives to keeping alive the image of our culture, as archeologists try to reconstruct the pieces of how we used to be.

We could hardly learn from our mistakes if we didn’t have the capacity to remember and analyze in what moment we deviated from the intended road, or reacted inadequately to a completely new situation.

Its key, to create our own story through a series of processes that allow us to access in an easier way our memory during the course of our lives, it doesn’t have to be written, every person should manage information in their own way. The important thing is to create a system with an easy to use method. Some recommendations are:

• Mnemonics: Consists of a series of mental processes, systematic exercises, repetitions, etc. to facilitate remembering something. A common example is: Keep Pond Clean Or Frogs Get Sick, which is a mnemonic device to remember the classification methods in zoology: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species).
• Scrapbooks: The idea is to have a notebook to glue together a mashup of pictures, magazines, books, news, etc. All relative to important events in your life.
• Personal Journal: Are the more traditional method and consist of having a diary with a brief description of what happened in the day. A lot of people do this through Blog platforms, to share their life with others.
• Picture Albums: Are more structured spaces to place images of particular events and thus trigger the memory process.
• Voice Notes: Very common with healthcare professionals, a series of spoken registries of the day. They were usually hard to maintain because of the tapes, but with digital recordings it’s much easier today.

Personally, I use evernote for my journal with a little of all the things mentioned above, and highly recommend it.

A common mistake is to create entries only for events that seem important at the time; our perception is always modified by the conditions of the moment, so having an external memory can give us a different point of view, I recommend making a daily entry even if the fact seems trivial at the time.

So take note of everything, you don’t know at what time it may seem useful, and if it doesn’t, I can guarantee it will be a valuable resource to your future generations: What wouldn’t you give to know what your ancestors throughout history did or thought in their daily lives?