Which is more amazing, the amount of information we remember or the amount we forget? Without any external prompting, try and recall precisely what you were doing at this moment last year. Unless it was your birthday or some other significant occasion you probably don't have a clue!

How much of our lives do we remember? If we could actually add up all the days we can recall easily and accurately, would it be equal to a month, two months, or just a few days? Do we forget more than we remember?

A friend of mine has meticulously kept a daily diary since 1977, some 22 years. I just rang and asked him what he was doing at this precise time last year. He could not remember at all without checking his diary, but once he did, to assist his recall, he could remember almost all the details he thought he had forgotten.

His storehouse of memories remained dormant until they were triggered by his own diary entries! A large part of that day came flooding back to him as he reread his diary entries. John has greater access to his memories of the last 22 years than I will ever have of mine. His diary provides him with his memory "triggers".

Memory plays a decisive part in all our lives. In fact without it we would live (as many Alzheimer's victims do) in a strange, disconnected and disjointed world. A world of forgetfulness.

It seems the best way to hold onto the detailed events of our past is through a daily diary or journal. Photographs may help, but more detailed prompts are needed.

However, the memories we recall are our own recreation of the past as we experienced it at the time. As difficult as it might be to accept, we not only "invent" (some would prefer to say 'create') our own view of the world, but we also reconstruct our past with a lot of inventiveness and subjectivity.

To a great degree, what we see of the world around us depends where our attention is focused at the time. But when we observe an event we don't store an exact copy of the event in our memory. Instead we store a rough "bare bones" approximation of how we saw the event, which we then continue to reshape as time goes on. Even though John can recall with the help of his diary many events he otherwise would not remember, with the passage of time he, like all of us, tends to put more and more of a personal, subjective imprint on the memories.

The further we move away from any event, the more we overlay it with additions and omissions. Can we trust our memories or do we always have to be suspicious of our own 'reconstructed past'?

Obviously our memories do recall a lot of information correctly although not perfectly or completely. Witnesses of the same event can differ enormously with what they saw.

Our memory of a specific event can be influenced by many factors, such as the amount of attention we devoted to the event; the way we processed the incoming information; the prompts we used at the time to help us 'remember 'it later; whether we got the event locked into our long-term memory (casual phone numbers don't go there); how we organised the information at the time; what we use to search or 'trigger' our memory store; the extent we use imagery to reconstruct the event; the amount of "interference" we experienced at the time; and finally the time gap between the event and the moment of recall.

If we want to have access to our memories we need to take positive steps and not simply depend on our natural ability of recall.

The sad part is that a large part of our lives can be lost in forgetfulness unless we build into our daily life-styles, memory recall "triggers" which we can use later to help us access the great wealth and history of our own unique journeys found within our memories.

A daily journal would be a great start!