I’m 65, and my neurodegenerative disease is continuing to get worse.

But today is Halloween, one of the great children’s holidays, and one I love. I made up a mind map this morning to help dredge up some of my memories I have of Halloween since I first started participating in the annual ritual of collecting chocolate bars around 1956.

I don’t recall as much as I did last year about this time in my life although I do recall a lot as I go through the memory retrieval exercise needed for an autobiographical mind map. Had I made this map a year ago I would have greater access to my memories now. Had the map been made 15 years ago before the memory damage symptoms became significant, I probably could have written down very much I loved about the holiday.

The basic point is simple. If you anticipate neurocognitive problems (or have them now) you can increase your enjoyment of the future by recording (in a list, a mind model/map, a video, pictures and captions) your memories and feeling about Halloween past and future. It does not take long, does not cost much, and you probably will want it even if you do not have significant memory loss and dementia but rather just have typical aging memory issues.

In my opinion, mind maps are the best way to document your life using visual thinking methods. There are many other ways. Pick one that works for you.

Click on the mind model/map below to expand it.