A reminder about reminders

Today, as we step out the door for our morning 4-mile walk, my wife will chirp, “Got your keys?”

I KNOW she’ll say it. 

She ALWAYS says it. 

Sometimes, I swear, my eyes roll clear to the top of my skull.

But do you know...because Cindi does this, I have NEVER forgotten my keys on one of our walks. 

We’ve NEVER locked ourselves out of the house.

The reminders work.

Here's the grim truth: We are a forgetful species. I am literally full of forget.

The other day—on a morning walk—I crossed paths with a guy I’ve had lunch with at least five times. 

I couldn’t recall his name for half a mile.

Embarrassing!

Also disturbing.

I think of my mother who passed away in 2016 due to frontotemporal dementia.

Someone described this cruel disease—which mimics Alzheimer’s—like this: “Picture your brain as a giant erasable marker board filled with all the facts and details of your life. Each day the disease takes an eraser and makes another giant sweep across the board.”

That’s about right. As time went on, Mom couldn’t remember simple words, how to put on a shoe, or the fact that she’d been married for 66 of her 89 years.

Neurological diseases aside, why aren’t we better remember-ers?

One theory of neuroscientists says that when we acquire information we deem important, our brains store it and create a pathway—a memory trace—to where it’s stored. The more often we access that information, the easier it is to find and use it in the future.

But if we don’t remember to use the mental pathways that lead to those bits of information, the memory traces become like unused hiking trails in the jungle. They get overgrown and lost.

The desired information is still there in our long-term memory. But we forget it’s there, and how helpful it is. 

So, now you know why my weekly emails consist mostly of business and marketing reminders. I think Samuel Johnson nailed it...

We need to be reminded more often than we need to be instructed. 

We know so much good stuff already...way more than we think. 

But because we're prone to forget, we need reminders.

Hopefully, mine are helpful.

And not annoying.

Like that “Got your keys?” lady.