Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting

by Lisa Genova

How can you both remember a penny and yet remember so little about it? Is your memory failing? It’s not. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Of all the complex and wondrous miracles that your brain executes, memory is king.

You need memory to learn anything. Without it, information and experiences can’t be retained.

The significant facts and moments of your life strung together create your life’s narrative and identity. Memory allows you to have a sense of who you are and who you’ve been.

If you’ve witnessed someone stripped bare of his or her personal history by Alzheimer’s disease, you know firsthand how essential memory is to the experience of being human.

It is not graceful

we actually don’t remember most of our lives.

How many days, in full, specific detail, can you remember from last year? Most people recall an average of only eight to ten.

Why do we remember our first kiss but not our tenth?

Memory is quite economical. In a nutshell, our brains have evolved to remember what is meaningful.

Most of the time, forgetting isn’t actually a problem to solve.

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.

Our fears around forgetting aren’t only about a dread of aging or Alzheimer’s. They’re also about losing any of our memory’s capability.

Effective remembering often requires forgetting.

There are many flavors—memories for the present moment, for how to do things, for the stuff you know, for what just happened, for what you intend to do later—and each memory is processed and organized in your brain in distinctly different ways.

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.

Making a memory literally changes your brain.

separate experiences become linked. To become a memory that you can later recall—

previously unrelated neural activity becomes a connected pattern of neural activity.

change in neural architecture and connectivity can later be reexperienced—or remembered—through the activation of this now-linked neural circuit. This is memory.

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...

The hippocampus, a seahorse-shaped structure deep in the middle of your brain, is essential for memory consolidation.

The hippocampus binds your memories. It is your memory weaver. What happened? Where and when did it happen? What does it mean? How did I feel about it? The hippocampus links all these separate pieces of information from disparate parts of the brain together, knitting them into a retrievable unit of associated data, a neural network that, when stimulated, is experienced as a memory.

your hippocampus is necessary for the formation of any new memories that you can later consciously retrieve. If your hippocampus is damaged, your abilit...

any new information from today that you perceive and attend to, that you find interesting, special, surprising, useful, meaningful, or, well, memorable, will be processed by your hippocampus for consolidation into memory.

you need a hippocampus to form new memories, once they are made, they don’t reside there.

where are memories stored? In no one place. They are distributed throughout the parts of the brain that registered the initial experience.

Retrieval of a memory happens when one part of the memory is stimulated, triggering activation of the linked memory circuit.

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.

We tend to pay attention to—and therefore remember—what we find interesting, meaningful, new, surprising, significant, emotional, and consequential.

Repeated exposure alone simply isn’t enough to guarantee that we will remember something. We need to add attention.

Paying attention requires conscious effort. Your default brain activity is not attentive.

If you want to remember something, you have to turn your brain on, wake up, become consciously aware, and pay 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.

While attention is necessary for the creation of a new memory, it isn’t sufficient.

Beyond the input of your attention, the processing of information or an experience into a lasting memory begins in the here and now.

prefrontal cortex, and this is where the present moment is remembered.

Whatever is held in your consciousness right now is called your working memory.

Working memory only holds what you are paying attent...

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.

Psychologists call working memory for what you see your visuospatial scratchpad.

Working memory for what you hear is called your phonological loop, the auditory version of the visual scratchpad.

You can hold visual information in the scratchpad and auditory information in your phonological loop for only about fifteen to thirty seconds.

We can only remember seven plus or minus two things for fifteen to thirty seconds in working memory.

you can fit more information in your working memory if you can chunk the items to be remembered.

Your phonological loop can manage however many words you can say in about two seconds, and it can then hold these words for fifteen to thirty seconds before the soundtrack fades.

We have three basic types of long-term memories: memory for information, memory for what happened, and memory for how to do things.

muscle memory. With repetition and focused practice, complex sequences of previously unrelated physical movements can be bound together and executed as a single action instead of as a series of separate, labored steps.

while you might not remember what your spouse said five minutes ago, muscle memories are remarkably stable and can be called back into play even after sitting on the bench for decades.

We typically consider memory to be the stuff we know (an octagon has eight sides, our phone number, the earth is round) and the stuff that happened (I tore my anterior cruciate ligament playing rugby in college, Pharrell Williams gave me a thumbs-up and a smile after one of my talks, I went to a wedding last weekend). These kinds of memories are called declarative.

Retrieval of declarative memories involves the conscious recall of previously learned information and previously lived experience.