Keep Forgetting Things? Neuroscience Says These 5 Habits Improve Memory and Leadership

• massive study of 27,842 conducted by researchers associated with the Harvard School of Public Health, which found a link between diet and memory.
• it's consumption of fruits and vegetables while young that counts the most.
• you can't live on unhealthy food for 50 or 60 years and then make up for it by tripling down in your later years.

laboratory study out of Michigan State University determined that working in an environment with dim lighting can "change the brain's structure and hurt one's ability to remember and learn."

• Half of a group of Nile grass rats were kept in an environment with dim lighting. 
• The other half of the group of rats lived in an environment with much brighter lighting.

In the end, the rats in the dim light "lost about 30 percent of capacity in the hippocampus, a critical brain region for learning and memory, and performed poorly on a spatial task they had trained on previously," according to the study.

study out of King's College London. Researchers here wanted to determine if intermittent fasting might spur hippocampal neurogenesis  and improve the memory performance of lab mice.

• A control group of mice who were treated and fed as always
• A calorie-restricted group (CR), for which daily food intake was reduced by 10%
• An intermittent fasting group (IF), for which food was similarly reduced, but that were fed only every other day during the study.

results-The study found that the intermittent fasting group had "improved long-term memory retention compared to the other groups."

Neuroscientists at Trinity College in Dublin surmised recently in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience that forgetfulness has a lot more to do with inability to access memories, as opposed to whether the memories were still physically stored in the brain.

These researchers say it might be a net positive

best advice here might simply be not to worry about normal memory loss.

Instead, accept it as a normal, healthy part of brain function--but also shore up your important memories with checklists, calendars, and other tools.