Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting

by Lisa Genova

Repeated exposure alone simply isn’t enough to guarantee that we will remember something. We need to add 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 have three basic types of long-term memories: memory for information, memory for what happened, and memory for how to do things.

As you move through your day today, think about what experiences or information might be meaningful enough to weather the test of time. Will you remember any of what you learned or what happened today by tomorrow, next week, next year, twenty years from now? Or will today rapidly fade into obscurity, the very bottom of Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve? How many of your days will be erased entirely?

When performing optimally, memory doesn’t remember everything. It retains what is meaningful and useful, and it discards what isn’t. It keeps the signal and purges the noise. Our ability to forget is likely to be just as vital as is our ability to remember.

Progression from the first symptoms of forgetting to end-stage Alzheimer’s takes an average of eight to ten years. This disease eventually and profoundly impairs the formation and retrieval of every kind of memory. Forgetting due to Alzheimer’s is pervasive, catastrophic, tragic, and not normal.

In considering the long list of stressors you encounter regularly, I would bet that forgetting is one of them. Do you become frustrated, fearful, or worried every time you can’t remember a name, forget to pick up your dry cleaning, or puzzle over where you put your phone? Are you frequently stressed out about these kinds of routine lapses in memory? Now that you understand that acute stress can interfere with recall and that chronic stress can literally shrink your hippocampus, you know that fretting about forgetting can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. So let’s all take a collective deep breath. The next time you struggle with the name of that famous surfer or forget to buy milk at the store, you can remember that these are examples of normal forgetting and, hopefully, you can relax. Forgetting happens. If you stress about it, it will happen even more.

As a rule of thumb, anything that is good for your heart is good for your brain—and for preventing Alzheimer’s. So if you’re already mindful of your heart health, this is good news for your brain. High blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, smoking, and high cholesterol all increase your risk of developing Alzheimer’s. Some autopsy studies show that as many as 80 percent of people with Alzheimer’s disease also had cardiovascular disease. Having increased high-density lipoprotein (HDL, the “good” cholesterol) is associated with a 60 percent decreased risk of Alzheimer’s compared with people with low HDL. Statins have been shown to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s in people seventy-five or older. You have already learned about sleep’s potential impact on the development of Alzheimer’s, but sleep’s effects are worth reemphasizing here. Chronic sleep deprivation is a significant risk factor for Alzheimer’s. I find this conclusion both terrifying (because of the decades I’ve already spent staying up too late, getting up too early, and feeding babies throughout the night) and encouraging—because I can do something about it now. If you don’t yet have Alzheimer’s, that means that your amyloid plaque levels haven’t reached the tipping point. However sleep-deprived you’ve already been in your life is water under the bridge. You can still fight against the daily accumulation of amyloid in your brain by getting enough sleep tonight. If you do nothing else to lower your risk of Alzheimer’s, ...

You want to pave new neural roads. Building an Alzheimer’s-resistant brain through cognitive stimulation means learning to play piano, meeting new friends, traveling to a new city, or reading this book. You’re welcome. And if, despite all this, you are someday diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, there are three lessons I’ve learned from my grandmother and Greg and the dozens of other people I’ve come to know living with this disease: Diagnosis doesn’t mean you’re dying tomorrow. Keep living. You won’t lose your emotional memory. You’ll still be capable of understanding love and joy. You might not remember what I said five minutes ago or even who I am, but you’ll remember how I made you feel. You are more than what you can remember.