Is your memory poor?

"An accurate and retentive memory is the basis of all success,” says, Harry Loraine.                                                 No one can succeed without developing and utilizing one’s memory. Let it be examination, business, job relationships or anything else. Without developing and cultivating your memory it will be difficult to climb the ladders. Is your memory sharp and accurate? One Hundred percent accuracy is only an ideal dream. Do you think it is sharp enough and good enough that you can rely on it whenever you will require its services? Or do you think it is rather fading? Again as per Harry, the greatest memory expert ever,   ‘There is no good or bad memory. There is only trained or untrained memory, exercised or unexercised memory.’ Every memory is good. They become better with use and exercise and rusted with disuse and neglect.   It may true that we can remember more easily in the area of our liking. If you are a singer you recollect songs easily. I sometimes wonder how many songs these singers can recollect with ease. They will be able to recite a song after listening to it once, twice or thrice. Great playback singers get Ok in the first take itself. The music director does not have to keep on repeating the tune over and over to them. Their memory is in harmony with music and its myriad permutation and combinations.

I have heard many youngsters say, “ I can’t remember a thing of math.”  But you ask the same guy the rules of rugby. He will recite the entire lot of them without a single omission. Another girl may recall exactly the dates and the venues where his basket ball hero scored high. If you ask a boy from India the stadium, city and country, where, Sachin Tendulkar scored a century he will tell all of them without making a mistake.  They all have a good memory after all, although they find math tough. One remembers what one is interested in. Memory functions much better in an area one innately likes and performs poorly in another which the individual dislikes.  This explains why some students score high in languages and are bad in math or physics. Some others get A+ in math and science subjects and D in languages. When you like a subject you are more interested in it and this leads to better memorizing and better recall .  If you give less attention to what you want to memorize, the weaker will be the impression and hence difficult the recall later. Everyone has got the capacity to memorize, retain and recall much more than they believe they can. Due to non-use the faculty may have been rusted. But it can be polished or sharpened at any age or at any time.  It may be true that the power of memory retention slows down with age. But as the power of the faculty is very high and as we use only a fraction of it normally, this does not matter at all. Memory cells are lost if you bang your head against something or if you consume alcohol or drugs. The loss of a few thousand cells of the brain may not affect you much as there are over 100 billion neurons and as you do not be using even 10 % of the whole lot. The loss will be further mitigated as the nearby neurons will take up the work of the dead ones before long. If you exercise your mind and body and keep a thirst for life, you can recall, retain and memorize anything up to a good old age.  But if you don’t exercise your memory at all it may have a premature death.