New Neuroscience reveals 4 secrets that will improve your memory

Transience is the weakening or loss of memory over time. Thanks to transience, we can forget embarrassing moments from high school, only to replace them with new embarrassing moments from adulthood. Daniel says with age our memories generally go from “reproductive and specific recollections to reconstructive and more general descriptions.

In people’s forties, story recall begins to decline. Word recall gets trickier in our fifties. It’s usually not huge – generally a 10-15% decline versus younger cohorts. Roughly 20% of people in their seventies still have memories as sharp as college students.

It’s likely due to the effects of education. More schooling builds up what neuroscientists call “cognitive reserve.” Strengthen those brain muscles early on and you have a lot more to spare when aging starts doing its withering work. Research shows cognitive reserve not only prevents the memory decline caused by normal aging but also provides a buffer against dementia.

Now it might be a little late to go back and get that Master’s degree. So what can we do to keep our memories from fading?

You want to do more “elaboration during encoding.” That’s fancy talk for relating new information to things you already know. This helps to produce less transient memories. When new information has no relationship to old information your brain doesn’t know where to file it and it ends up getting lost. By hanging new memories on hooks provided by previous memories you make more natural connections and are more likely to remember things longer.

Memory tricks can help. When we convert things we want to remember into vivid or bizarre visual images, they’re more likely to stick.

You may have heard about “memory palaces.” This is a powerful technique where you mentally stroll through an imaginary location, placing memories in specific spots. Problem is, it’s a lot of work and as complex as trying to follow the plot of “Inception” after a few too many glasses of wine. I’ll stick to writing things down on my hand, thanks. But there’s a lesson here: hard work is the signal your brain responds to when it comes to memory. Just like lifting heavy weights tells muscles, “You need to grow”, effort tells the brain “This needs to be remembered.

A less involved method for reducing transience is “retrieval practice.” The more frequently you remember something, the easier it is to remember it again later. This is why smart students use flash cards. Distributing that practice over time increases the power of this technique. And that’s why cramming for a test rarely results in long term retention.

No, I don’t expect you to use flash cards for remembering everyday stuff. So what’s a dead simple way to fight your memory’s tendency toward transience?

Studies show the more we talk and think about things in our everyday life, the better we retain them. So if you want to remember something, discuss it with friends. Read more about it. Even conversing with yourself about stuff you want to retain has been shown to help.

And the next memory issue we need to tangle with? Wait — where’d I put it? It’s around here somewhere…

This isn’t when memories fade with time – it’s when you can’t find your keys or forget you had a lunch meeting today.

You walk into a room and suddenly your brain pulls a Houdini on you. You’re left standing in the kitchen, holding a can opener, wondering if you were about to fight a robot or make tuna salad. It’s like your brain is playing a never-ending game of hide and seek with your intentions. Your brain laughs at you like Vincent Price in a campy horror movie, followed by maniacal organ music.

What causes this? It’s not transience – it’s because you didn’t really encode the information to begin with. You weren’t paying attention when you put your keys down, so you never created a memory of where they are. The reason this happens so frequently with keys and eyeglasses is because these are things we do on autopilot. We’re not thinking and so the information doesn’t get stored. Of course, this problem gets worse with age because memory encoding isn’t as efficient in our later years.

How do we deal with absent-mindedness? The basic recommendation is simple: pay attention. (I used to think I had the attention span of a goldfish, but I think I owe goldfish an apology at this point.) If something is important, get off autopilot and deliberately focus on it.

May be easier said than done. In that case, convert memories to physical reminders. You put lunch meetings on your calendar. Always put your keys in the same place. Set alarms. Get things out of your head and into the world. There’s a reason Post-It notes are a multi-zillion dollar industry. (My living space looks less like a home and more like the scene of a conspiracy theorist’s last stand.)

Alright, next memory issue is… Oh, what’s the name. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Starts with a “B”…

Blocking is when the memory is in there but you can’t get it out. It’s like a mental paywall on an article you really want to read. You’re standing there, mouth agape, trying to remember that celebrity’s name, and your brain is like a lazy cat that just flicks its tail and stares at you. Suddenly “That actor from that movie with the thing…” becomes a fun group activity.

Depressingly, blocking gets more common with age. Research shows college students have 1-2 “tip of the tongue” experiences per week while elderly folks have twice that. And middle-aged people score right in between. Studies show it’s the #1 biggest cognitive complaint of people over 50, by far. Blocking keeps life spicy. Who needs the monotony of always knowing what you’re talking about?

The research here is fascinating. Blocking occurs most often with proper names. They even have a cool name for the underlying issue: “the Baker/Baker paradox.”

Proper names are arbitrary. The fact that someone’s name is Baker doesn’t connect with anything about them. It’s random. But remembering that someone’s profession is a baker calls up a wealth of associations and connections in your mind. (Ooh, fresh bread.) So you’re much more likely to recall that someone works as a baker, but remembering that their name is Baker is a challenge. (There’s even an amusing study that showed people were more likely to block on the names Aladdin, Mary Poppins, and Pinocchio than with Grumpy, Snow White, and Scrooge. The latter are all descriptive.)

Also, with most words our brains can quickly compensate with synonyms (if you don’t remember “banker”, you can say “works in finance” and nobody’s the wiser). But with proper names there’s no substitute – you either remember “Christopher Nolan” and “Memento” or you end up saying, “Um, that director-guy who did the movie about not remembering anything.”

So what can we do about it? First off, don’t give up. Time helps. The majority of blocks resolve within a minute and the more time people spend the more likely they are to recover the memory.

There are moments when the issue with memory is not getting it to work but figuring out how to make it stop. Persistence is when you keep recalling things you don’t want to. You enter the enormous mental Costco warehouse of regret, guilt, and shame but can’t find the exit. Internal monologue becomes infernal monologue.

We retain emotional memories better than unemotional ones. It makes sense. If something is dangerous or strange your brain is like, “Hmm, better keep this one at the top of the pile.” And it’s why a powerful mnemonic trick is creating bizarre or silly images.

Pushing the ugly memory away doesn’t help. That’s the “don’t think of a white bear” issue, first explained by Harvard’s Daniel Wegner. So how do we hit the “mark as read” button on those distressing memories?

Discussing these thoughts can help. May sound ironic given that earlier we saw that talking about memories strengthens them, but here the talking helps dissipate the emotion that keeps them coming back. This is why therapists — the human equivalent of IT support for emotions – can help.

Another trick is writing about them. Writing creates a narrative around the memories that helps you make sense of them. This is extraordinarily powerful. Putting your thoughts on a page means there are fewer of them jangling around inside your head. People who write about their problems report improved mood, higher GPA’s, reduced work absenteeism, and higher rates of reemployment after losing a job.