Jeremiah and I both have trouble remembering when we've locked the door or turned off the toaster oven before leaving the house. Associating a routine action with a movement, sound, or other event unrelated to the humdrum behavior can help you easily remember it. As it turns out, performing an unrelated action in conjunction with a habit can also help you remember to do the routine thing in the first place. Now that's interesting.

From today's Science Daily:

"In extended medication-taking situations, the habitual nature of the task may make it difficult for older adults to remember whether or not they took the medication on a particular day, especially if pill boxes are not used," explains Mark McDaniel, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.

"To remedy this potential problem, older adults could be instructed to take their medication while placing one hand on their head or in some other unusual or silly way, like crossing their arms," he suggests. "Our results indicate that older adults can use these sorts of more complex motor tasks to effectively reduce repetition errors in habitual prospective memory tasks, such as taking a daily medication."

The key here is that muscle memory is working along with your brain's memory of the narrative of your day. And what works for the old, works for the young.

BoingBoing posted about this study today and got some interesting tips from readers regarding the pairing of movements, speech, or sounds with routine actions to help cement a memory and avoid that nagging "Did I remember to lock the door?" feeling. Advice includes:

• "When I lock my car I will check two of the doors are locked, or when I lock my house up, I will shake the door." - Gerg


• "I have the tendency to think I have forgotten to lock it (which will haunt me all day), so I say the name of the day to myself when locking the door. I can then recall that if I have recited the day's name it is associated with locking the door and the memory is easily retrievable." - Ocncty


• "I hit a metal column in my basement to remember turning off the iron. I do not know why unplugging it cannot be remembered distinctively from day to day, but making a sound can." - Oxdeadbeef


• "For a long time, when I've needed to remember something important, I associate a reminder with something I know I will see at a time when I need to be reminded. (e.g. Yesterday, I needed to return a library book, and the library was close to my bus stop, so I associated the area around the bus stop with remembering to return the book). What they're talking about is the same, just using kinaesthetic rather than visual associations." - Kieran O'Neill

Give it a try! Or let us know how you remember that you've performed those routine tasks so you don't have to drive back home, like I sometimes do, because I'm not sure if I turned off the stove.