Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting

by Lisa Genova

we often forget not because it’s efficient for our brains to do so but because we haven’t supplied our brains with the kinds of input needed to support memory creation and retrieval.

You’ll learn that attention is essential for creating a memory for anything. If you don’t pay attention to where you park your car in the mall garage, you’ll struggle to find it later, but not because you’ve forgotten where you parked. You have forgotten nothing. Without adding your attention, you never formed a memory for where you parked in the first place.

Creating a memory takes place in four basic steps: Encoding. Your brain captures the sights, sounds, information, emotion, and meaning of what you perceived and paid attention to and translates all this into neurological language. Consolidation. Your brain links the previously unrelated collection of neural activity into a single pattern of associated connections. Storage. This pattern of activity is maintained over time through persistent structural and chemical changes in those neurons. Retrieval. You can now, through the activation of these associated connections, revisit, recall, know, and recognize what you learned and experienced.

If we want to remember something, above all else, we need to notice what is going on. Noticing requires two things: perception (seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling) and attention.

The number one reason for forgetting what you just said, a person’s name, where you left your phone, and whether you already drove over a really big bridge is lack of attention.

You find what you look for. If you look for magic every day, if you pay attention to the moments of joy and awe, you can then capture these moments and consolidate them into memory. Over time, your life’s narrative will be populated with memories that make you smile.

We live in a constantly connected, go-go-go time plagued by distraction. Your smartphone, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, text alerts, e-mails, incessantly racing thoughts—all of these are attention thieves and, by extension, memory thieves. Minimizing or removing things that distract you will improve your memory. Getting enough sleep, meditating, and a little caffeine (not too much and none twelve hours before bed) are powerful distraction fighters and can enhance your ability to pay attention and therefore to establish long-term memories.

For example, working memory carries the beginning of the sentence you are reading now long enough for you to understand the entire sentence by the time you reach the end of it. It stitches one moment to the next, giving you a contiguous understanding of what’s going on. It allows you to follow a conversation, to comprehend the plotline of a movie, and to multiply twelve by fourteen in your head. You use your working memory to keep a phone number or passcode in your consciousness just long enough to enter the numbers into your phone or computer before they vanish from your mind.

Information can’t be held in working memory for long. You can hold visual information in the scratchpad and auditory information in your phonological loop for only about fifteen to thirty seconds. That’s it. And then the contents are displaced by the next piece of incoming information.