• Remembering people's names from introductions
• Remembering shopping lists and To Do lists
• Remembering where you put your keys and other items
• Memorizing text for speeches and/or tests (memory for understanding- doesn't have to be exact)
• Memorizing poems and/or songs (memory for exact recital)
• Memorizing the phone numbers of friends and associates

We consider some techniques in the course optional because they are geared more for magicians or performers than the average person. Mastery of these tehniques depends on how much they are used and may take a month, but they can be learned within a very short period of time. Our optional memory techniques include:

• Memorizing a deck of cards in order.
• Keeping track of a deck of cards with the goal of knowing exactly which cards are left in the deck (a technique faster and easier than memorizing the exact order of cards).
• Memorizing the days of the week for any given date in the next 10 years (great for impressing friends) E.g. someone asks you what day of the week July 4th will be in 2005 and you will know from memory that it will fall on a Monday. It's easier to be able to do this than you'd think.
• Memorizing a magazine not just for content but an exact mental duplicate. E.g. answering questions like 'what page number is the picture of the dog on?'. etc.
• Memorizing a To Do list or a shopping list of 1000 items (our everyday system is based around memorizing lists of 25 items)

First of all, let us explain a little about Alzheimer's disease because there are a lot of misconceptions about it and what happens to our memories as we age:

• Alzheimer's is a physical disease that has mental consequences because it affects the brain. Autopsies of people with Alzheimer's show tissue damage in sections of the brain.
• Once a diagnosis of Alzheimer's has been made a decline in many mental processes occurs. Particularly there is a sharp decline in the ability to acquire new information and a loss of recall for long term memories. The memory loss usually affects more recent memories first.
• Alzheimer's occurs most often in elderly people but it is not exclusively a disease of the elderly. It is NOT normal aging. The vast majority of elderly people do not get Alzheimer's regardless of age.
• Although there is some evidence that mental capacity diminishes with age, it is very minor in a normal person. As well, all mental skills do not decline equally as we get older- visual and spatial skills decline faster than memory. A few studies done on the effect of aging on memory in the 1960's and 70's were tainted with people that had Alzheimer's disease. Their results led to a misconception that memory loss in the elderly is normal.
• Today, middle aged and elderly people often have exaggerated beliefs about their own mental inadequacies, as compared to adults in their twenties. We now know that some memory capabilities, for example vocabulary, don't seem to diminish with age at all.
• We do not have a cure for Alzheimer's and we still do not know its cause. Current hypotheses are that it's directly caused by a virus we have not discovered or that it's some kind of auto-immune disease brought on by unknown factors (the body's own immune system fooled into attacking itself by any number of possible triggers).