The brain is an extraordinary organ, with many wonderful qualities, including the ability to forget, which can actually be a good thing. “If we were to remember everything we experienced, our brains would be hoarding, clogged with all sorts of useless junk that gets in the way of what we really need,” says Charan Ranganath, professor of psychology and director of the Dynamic Memory Laboratory. at the University of California Davis.
In today’s constantly connected, always-on world, people are faced with a barrage of information—emails, news, meaningless meetings, traffic updates, chatter from family members—far more than anyone can process, Ranganath explains. “Instead, evolution favored quality over quantity,” he says. “We get good-quality memories of the things we pay attention to, and that’s usually what’s important. But if we’re not paying attention to something to begin with, we’ll never get a good memory of it.”
These memory problems often appear at the most inconvenient times: when you’re in a hurry and can’t find your keys, when you walk into a room and don’t know what you’re here for, when you’re talking to an acquaintance whose name escapes you, when a friend is It refers to a nice moment that you shared and you don’t remember it. This kind of forgetfulness is completely normal, Ranganath says, but frustrating nonetheless. (Other, more serious conditions can cause memory loss and disruptions in memory recall, such as trauma, Alzheimer’s, and ADHD. Strategies to address these disorders may include therapy and medication, more intensive than the advice described here.)
In general, however, hope is not lost if your memory is a little rusty. Memory is an active process, not a passive one, says clinical neuropsychologist Michelle Braun. “Which sort of undermines the long-standing myth that brain health is just a product of genetics and there’s really nothing we can do about it,” she says. Paying a little more attention and savoring special events can help you remember life’s moments, big and small.
Start giving your full attention to important events and interactions
The responsibilities of modern life mean there are more priorities than ever vying for your attention. How many times have you walked away from a conversation with no idea what was discussed because you were distracted by your phone? “You can get impoverished memories of past events because you were never really there in the first place,” Ranganath says.
Inattention is one of memory researcher Daniel Schacter’s “seven sins of memory,” common weaknesses in memory that we all experience. This is when you don’t pay attention to where you put your keys or are so giddy that you miss an important doctor’s appointment. “If, for example, we multitask, we may never really encode the information about where I left my keys or my glasses,” says Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard University.
Another method to help you pay more attention to the tasks at hand is what Braun calls the PLR technique: pause, link, and rehearse. This can help you remember someone’s name and why they walked into a room. If you’re hiding a birthday gift for your child but are afraid you won’t remember where you put it, take five seconds to pause and focus on where you’re putting the gift, as opposed to “just putting it down and looking away.” and do something else,” says Braun. Then look at the environment, this is the “link” step, and contextualize where you hid the present with his environment: in his closet, next to a shoe bin. The final step is to rehearse the process of retrieving the present. Look away from the hiding place and visualize in your mind where the present is.
Use technology to your advantage, Ranganath and Schacter agree: Put meetings on your phone’s calendar (be detailed about who you’re meeting with, where, and why) and make sure alerts are turned on, set reminders, and take photos of the events to consult. for later. “Go back to those photos,” Ranganath says. Don’t just take a photo and let it languish in your camera roll forever. “Anything you can do to revisit unique moments will bring back all kinds of things.” (Schacter isn’t convinced that technology is detrimental to our memory, as some experts suggest. “I don’t think there’s a lot of hard evidence on that point,” he says.)
Make even everyday moments memorable
Events that occur during intense emotional states (fear, joy, anxiety, excitement, sadness) are more memorable. That’s why you remember your wedding day and maybe not your tenth date. To remember more mundane things—where you keep dress shoes you wear once a year, a name, an item you need to pick up at the store—make these things extraordinary, says five-time US memory champion and memory trainer. Nelson Dellis. “I’ve made my life more memorable,” he says. After his grandmother died of Alzheimer’s in 2009, Dellis began exploring ways to improve his own memory. Two years later, he won his first US Memory Championship, a competitive event consisting of memory challenges, thanks to memory-strengthening exercises.
Dellis assigns vivid images to whatever you’re trying to remember, whether it’s a number or an address. Maybe if you don’t want to forget about buying cheese at the grocery store, imagine a giant, incredibly stinky piece of cheese. Dellis sometimes pinches herself or says a unique mantra when she puts the keys down to remind herself of the weird thing she did at the time. Or suppose you meet someone named Steve at a party and he’s wearing a T-shirt with overalls on it. You could imagine him dressed in a full monkey costume. “Anything you can make too exaggerated,” says Dellis, “like if it smells weird, maybe you can imagine it smells even worse, or if it’s normal-sized, imagine it huge.”
Take time at the end of each day to reflect on what you want to remember
Another of Schacter’s seven memory sins is transience, which refers to forgetting over time. For example, the more time passes after watching a movie, the more details you will forget. But if you study or reflect on the things you want to remember, these memories are more likely to become stronger, Schacter says. Again, looking at pictures or videos he took of a particularly nice dinner with friends is a way to better memorize these events. Or, instead of photos, keep the scene in memory by writing a journal.
Dellis recommends spending five minutes before bed reminiscing about what happened that day. Did you see a beautiful sunset? Did your child have a funny answer to a simple question? Did you eat something delicious? He replays the small but lovely events that he would like to savor. “The more you do that, over time you find that you’ll be able to remember more details of your life,” Dellis says.
Be proactive and avoid forgetfulness
It can be difficult to anticipate what you will forget in the future. But having an idea of what your memory deficiencies are can help safeguard these important items in your memory. If you sign up for a free trial and know you’ll likely forget to cancel before you’re charged for the rest of the year, setting a reminder on your phone to notify you to cancel isn’t too technology-dependent. , is to know your blind spots. This is what Schacter refers to as having good metacognition, “a good sense of how your memory works,” he says. “Being aware of the fact that your memory may fail in the future, although at this moment it seems crystal clear that you should be able to remember this, but you know that a year from now, projecting into the future, you may not be so”.
Perhaps remembering names is one of your memory weaknesses: a “sin” Schacter refers to as blocking (where the information you want is on the tip of your tongue but you can’t access it). Before you attend a wedding or your kids’ basketball game, try reeling off the names of the people who often attend these events, Schacter says. This exercise doesn’t need to be more than a few minutes of updating, maybe jumping from Instagram from one social connection to another. “With the lockdown,” he says, “you really have to get ahead of yourself because by the time it happens, it’s too late.”
Even if you consider yourself a forgetful person, memory is a skill that can be practiced and strengthened, Dellis says. Before participating in memory contests, Dellis never considered himself a person with an extraordinary memory. Challenge yourself, she says, by assigning vivid and unique images to grocery items and try shopping without a list. Tell yourself that you will remember 10 new names at a social event.
“It’s very easy to say, ‘I’m just the person with the bad memory,’” Dellis says. “When you start to change that narrative and start to realize that our memories are actually more amazing than most people realize…it’s just a snowball effect that makes your memory even more powerful.”
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