Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting

by Lisa Genova

we don’t have specialized memory-storage neurons or a memory cortex.

There is no memory bank. Long-term memories don’t reside in one particular neighborhood in your brain.

Memory is stored throughout your brain in the pattern of neural activity that was stimulated when the event or information was first experienced.

semantic and episodic memories are consolidated via the hippocampus, muscle memories are bound together by a part of the brain called the basal ganglia.

we remember almost nothing before the age of three and very little before the age of six.

But most of life’s episodic memories are likely to be clustered between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Called the reminiscence bump,

People with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) can recall the details of what happened from almost every day of their lives from late childhood on.

Prospective memory is your memory for what you need to do later. This

Retrieval begins to don rose-colored glasses as we grow older, and we show an increasing tendency to recall the good stuff and forget the bad.

chronic stress had a 65 percent increased risk of Alzheimer’s.

the “nappuccino.” He drinks coffee just before he nods off for a twenty-minute nap.

the Mediterranean diet or the MIND diet (a combination of the Mediterranean diet and DASH [dietary approaches to

stop hypertension]) cut their risk of Alzheimer’s disease by anywhere from a third to a half.

symptoms of Alzheimer’s are ultimately caused by the loss of synapses. An average brain has over a hundred trillion synapses,