How To Recall Your Day With Mental Snapshots

One night, I asked myself how much of my day I remember. I tried to go through the day again in my mind and found that I had forgotten most of it.

I hardly remembered what I had for breakfast, let alone who I had met where. The memories I had were fuzzy and vague.

I was startled at how little of my day had left a trace in my memory.

I wondered what it was about and researched on the Internet. After a while, I realized that the main problem was that we spend large parts of our lives in autopilot mode.

We go through life without paying much attention to our surroundings, and we hang on to our thoughts. We signal to our brain that ninety-nine percent of everything that happens around us is irrelevant and can be forgotten.

Memory arises from attentiveness. Something that we do not pay attention to is forgotten. At least that is what we believe.

Somewhere in the subconscious are stored all this information that we thought we had forgotten, and under certain circumstances, it can come to the surface again. Hypnosis is an excellent example of how much we know without being able to retrieve this knowledge willingly. An experienced hypnotist can take you back to any point in your life and let you see what has happened.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could also consciously remember much more detail?

This is precisely what the playful exercise I do every day is all about.

Mental snapshots

I was always fascinated by the idea of a photographic memory. How cool would it be to be able to remember every little detail of every moment of your life

Of course, for all we know, that's impossible. But sometimes you have to dream the impossible to discover the possibilities.

After the evening, when I was frightened by my lousy memory, I did an experiment the next day during my lunch break.

I walked the streets and took a mental snapshot every few feet. I pretended that my eyes were camera lenses, and my brain was the film I wanted to capture the snapshots on.

That sounds pretty weird, doesn't it? Well, I would never have told anybody about it if the result of this simple experiment hadn't surprised me so positively.

But one thing at a time. How did I take my mental snapshots? I let my eyes wander while I was walking, and whenever I saw something interesting (a car, a passer-by, a dog), I imagined I was sucking the image into my head with my eyes. Then I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second and remembered the vision I had just seen and imagined that I was storing this mental image in my brain.

The whole process took at most one second per image.

Then I immediately withdrew my attention from the "photo framed" object and continued my walk. Soon I found the next motif and "photographed" that too.

When I had taken about fifteen snapshots, I sat down on a park bench. I was not very confident that this experiment was a success. But then I tried to remember as many of the snapshots as possible and was utterly amazed when I remembered each one.

I actually had pictures in my mind. Not every snapshot came back to me immediately, but as I walked my way again in my mind, all the pictures came back, effortlessly one after another.

I was impressed. But I was even more impressed the next morning when I woke up and made breakfast. Just out of curiosity, I tried to recall some of the pictures from the day before. When I noticed that almost all the images were still there, I was really amazed.

Could it be that a tiny moment of deliberate attention could have such an effect on my memory?

In the following days, I experimented more and more with my discovery. Instead of walking through the day with my head lowered and my head full of musing, I now looked around me more often and took mental snapshots.

I realized that it was good to know more in the evening about what I had been doing during the day. My life no longer felt as if large parts of it were disappearing irretrievably every evening.

The more I remembered, the more I trusted my brain. I had tangible proof that it was capable of much more than I had previously believed.

Of course, this exercise does not lead to a photographic memory, but that is not what this little exercise is all about.

My snapshots are a way for me to enjoy the wonder we all carry between our ears.

If you want to enjoy your mind once a day, I can highly recommend this little exercise. It will make you more attentive and mindful over time.

And now it's your turn: Look out the window, pick any object or person, suck the image into your brain with your eyes, close your eyes, and "photograph" the scene.

Did you do it? Then I'm curious if it worked for you too. But be careful - it can be addictive.