20160206 – Saturday – Short-term memory

Friday morning I visited Don and Una Strempel for a pre-arranged breakfast with them. Don and Una both looked really good which made me very happy because Don had just spent a day or two in hospital and Una had had a throat infection, but now both were well again. We chatted about their time in Cambodia and the mission work they had been doing.

After I left Don and Una I called in on Meg and David Clothier and spent some time with them and son Alex. I drove Meg to an hair dressing appointment at a little shop in an obscure shopping centre at Mitchell Park. There are two middle aged ladies who run the shop and I was really impressed with how they cut Meg’s hair. I know that many of us are always looking for a good hair dresser (and a reasonably cheap one) so I am going to include their address here. It is called Thatchairs hair and beauty and it is located at 97d McInerney Ave, Mitchell Park, SA (08) 8299 0330. For a trim it would cost me $25 which I think is not too bad for a good hair cut.

I am interested in how my brain is functioning lately. I have mentioned about how I as I am getting older my short-term memory is deteriorating. Wikipedia says this about short-term memory.

“Short-term memory (or “primary” or “active memory“) is the capacity for holding a small amount of information in mind in an active, readily available state for a short period of time. The duration of short-term memory (when rehearsal or active maintenance is prevented) is believed to be in the order of seconds. A commonly cited capacity is The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two (which is frequently referred to as Miller’s Law.) In contrast, long-term memory can hold an indefinite amount of information.Short-term memory should be distinguished from working memory, which refers to structures and processes used for temporarily storing and manipulating information.”

I have been conscious of my short-term memory diminishing in its capacity because of a certain task I have been doing lately.

I have been transferring data from my “Fay’s Story” file in facebook to my new web-site, fayberrystory.com.

I have been working on the pictures and story of Jeff’s and my trip to Israel in 1993. To transfer this data into my web site, I must go to “Fay’s Story,” search for an find a particular section, ie Chapter 6 – Bethlehem. I then select and copy the whole file and then paste it into a new post in my web-site.

Unfortunately,what happens is that everything but the photos transfers okay. The photos “appear” to transfer okay but when I get out of the “dashboard” I find the photos have NOT been transferred.

What I have worked out to do is to save each individual photo back to my PC into a file, and then copy them back again into a “gallery” in fayberrystory.com. Then I have to delete each individual picture that appears to be there but is not, one at a time, in the new post and then select and import the photo I have saved in my PC into the post. Here is the crunch!

This requires that I look at the photo I am about to delete and remember it so that I can select the correct picture from the gallery to import into the new post.

I find that my brain will not retain the memory of the picture long enough to choose the right picture to import. This has meant that it has taken me ages to do the job.

What I have had to do, or I would simply not get the job done, is to open a new tab for the facebook file so that the post in the website and the post in facebook  are side by side. This way I can compare the photos in each post and choose the correct one to import.

This has caused me to really take note of the deterioration in my short term memory.

This deterioration shows up in so many ways and because of it I am always having to find ways to compensate for the loss.

If I didn’t do what I do to compensate, I feel sure my memory loss would be quite acute by now.

Instead I am able to “stave off” my loss of memory to a very large degree.

I just hope my short-term memory can be improved by use, because I need it to last me for another 10 years or so, hopefully.

Our brains are certainly “fearfully and wonderfully made,” and how anyone can believe it just happened by blind chance is beyond me. It is definitely a “fool” who says in his heart, “there is no God.”