I've always prided myself on my memory. For most of my life I've possessed a borderline photographic short term memory that has enabled me to shortcut my way past many things (school in particular), recently though I've noticed a problem, I seem to have lost it. I think it started when the 'net truly started to take off and increasing amounts of information were stored and readily accessible. I stopped thinking "I must remember that", and instead changed my thinking to "I don't need to fill my brain up with that, I can always look it up if I need to know about it" and slowly, over the last few years I've completely got out of the habit of committing things to memory. It was with some surprise and a considerable amount of concern that recently in some conversations with Benjamin Waters that I noticed my memory is shockingly poor. I'd gone from being able to replay 20 chess games in a row move for move, to some dimwitted drooling idiot that was barely able to remember the contents of the last few books I'd read, even though I had enjoyed them! All of a sudden I felt like I had lost everything that I had done in the past 5 years, that nothing committed to memory at all, I imagine that this is how someone with alzheimer's disease must feel. It wasn't pleasant. I started to reflect precisely what I was in the habit of memorising, and fortunately there was something that I could clearly remember and that was technology related information. I still had an encyclopaedic chunk of knowledge in my head about all things technical in the IT world, but seemingly little outside of it. As you can imagine this situation is not acceptable to me so I've decided to start actually USING my memory again for one thing that I've learnt about memory is that the more you use it the better it gets, for me conclusively proven when I was studying chess and capable of all kinds of fairly strong feats of memory.
On the subject of memory I thought I'd share with you all something that doesn't appear to be as well known as I thought, or rather is only now starting to come into the general publics eye, omega-3. Some time back I read an article saying that scientists had discovered that they had discovered a substance to stimulate new neural pathways, omega-3s. Interestingly enough, or at least to me, no one seemed particular excited about this, I saw almost no follow up articles or a general acceptance of this news. Every time I saw omega-3 concentrates for sale it was always emphasizing its well know benefits on joins and flexibility. Out of curiousity I chatted to one of the guys who I worked with at the time and had a lot of respect for his intellect, upon asking I found out that he has taken omega-3 supplements for most of his life and, curiously, so had his parents. This triggered a memory of my own and I called up my mother and asked her what her father had forced her to have once a week, it was cod liver oil, one of the highest sources of omega-3's known to man. Now very curious I proceded to chat to a number of people both at work and outside that I considered "smart" people, without about 2 exceptions in 14 people I asked, they all took omega-3 supplements. Now I'll freely admit its all anecdotal evidence and hardly scientific but it was more then enough to convince me to try them and so for the past 2 years now I've been taking omega-3 supplements with what I would consider noticeable effects. Despite my complaints above about having a poor memory, it's not entirely correct. My memory is definitely poor when it comes to things that I consider unimportant, but my key memory for things relating to subjects that I do consider important remains very sharp. What's more since taking the omega-3 supplements I almost immediately noticed a clarity to my thoughts that had been absent for some time. With this as a background you can understand my interest when I read this article. While the article has a decidedly (and unfortunately somewhat typical of the left these days) biased doom and gloom leftist bent, it is nonetheless a nice starting point for looking into omega-3 and its an interesting thought that a lot of our current ailments in our society are possibly due to something as simple as nutrition.
I'm off to start regularly playing chess again ;)
