There is a growing and informal international organization, which I choose to name the "I've Got an Increasingly Bad Memory Club". How often do you hear people in animated and enthusiastic conversation saying things like, You know, my memory is not nearly as good as it used to be when I was younger; I'm constantly forgetting things. To which there is an equally enthusiastic reply: Yes, I know exactly what you mean; the same things happening to me.. . . And off they dodder, arms draped around each other shoulders, down the hill to mental oblivion. And such conversations often take place between thirty-year-old!
This negative, dangerous, incorrect mental set is based on lack of proper training, and this book is designed to correct it. Consider the younger super memorizer to whom most people romantically refer. If you want to check for yourself, go back to any school at the end of a day, walk into a classroom of a group of five to seven-year-old children after they have gone home and ask the teacher what has been left in the classroom (i.e., forgotten). You
will find the following items: watches, pencils, pens, sweets, money, jackets, physical education equipment, books, coats, glasses, erasers, toys, etc.
The only real difference between the middle-aged executive who has forgotten to phone someone he was supposed to phone and who has left his briefcase at the office, and the seven-year-old child who realizes on returning home that he's left at school his watch, his pocket-money and his homework is that the seven year-old does not collapse into depression, clutching his head and exclaiming, Oh, Christ, I'm seven years old and my memory's going!
