Mobile Phone's and Amnesia

The consequences of a lost phone or a crashed PDA is far greater than the financial distress or the sim card replacement procedures. We have become so depended to a mobile phone that it has become a necessity for day to day living. We have all our contacts, bank details, emails, Birthday's, Anniversaries, Appointments what and what not.

Try this exercise, write down the contact numbers of your 5 nearest family members and 10 friends without looking into the contacts, write down the birthdays of 5 of your closest friends. As i have found out the success rate is close to 40 % for my answers and i don't think it will be any better for yours. We have become so dependant on these gizmo's that one day if the machines raise a war against us, the first thing we will loose is our ability to contact others, network, foundation of human relationships.

We become so paranoid when we misplace a phone, become so stressed up when the software crashes. Something common in our nightmare is getting stranded in a deserted island without our mobile phones, it cant get worse than this. Before it gets really late we should do something about this memory handicap, some practical ideas are

• Try entering the number to dial before searching the contact to make a call


• Cross reference storage technique (i just made it up now) exchange names and numbers so that you will have to learn matching names and numbers.


• Forget your girlfriends or wife's birthday, wedding anniversary, they will make sure you will remember it next time (high success rate)


• Improvise Usual memory techniques like visualising something to remember the content, try visualising the consequences of loosing a number or a date like getting beaten up, loosing a contract, missing an interview etc.

This is a very apt time to write this article as my phone has crashed, SIM damaged and going thought the ordeal of identifying voices, matching accents and names, recovering phone data etc. Moral of the story is that we should get less dependant on these gizmo's and use some natural high powered brain memory.