Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting

by Lisa Genova

Recalling declarative memories can feel labored, maddening, and sometimes fruitless.

Muscle memory is different. This is your memory for motor skills and procedures, the choreography of how to do stuff. Muscle memory is unconscious, remembered below your awareness.

Once learned, the steps are retrieved instantly, effortlessly, and unconsciously. You are utterly unaware of these memories while remembering them.

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

As you continue to learn the skill, another part of the brain called the cerebellum provides additional feedback.

While the hippocampus is essential for forming new episodic and semantic memories, this brain structure isn’t involved at all in creating muscle memories.

consolidation of muscle memories requires repeated activation through lots of focused practice.

it generally takes much more repetition to learn a new skill than it does to learn someone’s name or remember where you parked your car.

Creating a muscle memory is different from how declarative memories are made. Retrieval is different, too, and remarkably so. Once learned, muscle memories are recalled without your conscious effort.

The stuff you know, so-called semantic memory, is memory for the knowledge you’ve learned, the facts you know about your life and the world—the Wikipedia of your brain. And you can recall this information without remembering the details of learning it. Semantic memory is knowledge disconnected from any personal when and where. It is data unattached to any specific life experience.

information that is attached to a where and when are called episodic. You remember episodic memories. “Remember when we went to Budapest.” Semantic memories, on the other hand, feel more like information that you just know. “Budapest is the capital of Hungary.” Episodic is personal and always about the past.

Semantic memory is about information and is timeless...

Semantic memory isn’t just for presidents, state capitals, math formulas, and whatever else you learned in school. This memory also houses all your personal data.

All the biographical information you fill out on registration forms—name, address, phone number, date of birth, your marital status, and so forth—is retrieved from your semantic memory.

Because every piece of data in our heads is a semantic memory, if we want to know a lot of information, we have to be really good at creating and retrieving semantic memories.

Memorization requires repetition and effort. But certain kinds of repetition and effort are more effective than others.

Which is better for long-term retention—cramming the night before or studying the material spaced out over the seven days? If the total number of study hours is equal, distributed practice beats out cramming.

Called the spacing effect, rehearsing the information to be remembered spaced out over time gives your hippocampus more time to fully consolidate what you’re learning.

Repeated testing beats repeated studying.

Meaning matters when it comes to creating and recalling any kind of memory. I can’t emphasize this enough.

A less daunting and more practical technique for memorizing the more modest kinds of lists you actually use is called the method of loci or memory palace.

The memory palace method provides elaborative encoding, associations to visual images and locations that your evolved brain loves and can use as hooks to fish out all the groceries on your list—in order, if you want to show off.

repetition, spaced learning, self-testing, meaning, and visual and spatial imagery—will no doubt strengthen your semantic memory.

In addition to the stuff you know, there is the stuff that happened.

Episodic memory, your memory for what happened in your life, is the history of you remembered by you. It is memory tethered to a place and time, the where and when recollections of your life’s experiences. Episodic memory is time-traveling to your past. Remember when…

Episodic memory is not interested in the same old, same old.

While our brains are terrible at remembering what is boring and familiar, they’re phenomenal at remembering what is meaningful, what is emotional, and what surprises us.

Remembering requires that we give the thing to be remembered our attention.

Life events infused with emotion are what we tend to remember long term—triumphs, failures, falling in love, humiliations, weddings, divorces, births, deaths.

Many studies have shown that episodic memories for emotional experiences are better remembered than are neutral experiences.

In general, the more emotional the event, the more vividly and elaboratel...

Emotion and surprise activate a part of your brain called the amygdala, which, when stimulated, sends powerful signals to your hippocampus that basically communicate this: Hey, what’s going on right now is super import...

Emotion and surprise act like a big brass marching band parading through your brain, waking up your neural circuitry to what is going on.

Flashbulbs are episodic memories for experiences that were shocking and highly significant to you and evoked big emotions—fear, rage, grief, joy, love. These stunningly unexpected, personally important, and emotionally charged experiences become memories that feel resistant to fading and can be readily recalled years later.

your most meaningful episodic memories create your life story and are collectively called your autobiographical memory.

The meaningful moments you keep within the chapters of your autobiographical memory aren’t necessarily all tales of rainbows and unicorns.

We tend to save the memories that feed our identity and outlook.

we remember almost nothing before the age of three and very little before the age of six. Our earliest episodic memories are the briefest short stories, sensory snapshots that are totally disconnected from the cohesive narrative starring you as the protagonist in your life.

Being kicked out fear of jail cutting my hand

The development of language in our brains corresponds with our ability to consolidate, store, and retrieve episodic memories.

We need the anatomical structures and circuitry of language to tell the story of what happened, to organize the details of our experiences into a coherent narrative that can then be revisited and shared later.

we only have access to memories of what happened when we owned the language s...

most of life’s episodic memories are likely to be clustered between the ages of fifteen and thirty. Called the reminiscence bump, these episodes are what we remember most in life. Why is this? We don’t really know, but most scientists think it’s because so many meaningful firsts are packed into those years—kiss, love, car, college, sex, job, house, marriage, child.

They’re all the same, all memorable. Most people only remember eight to ten events for any given year.

xmas spain trip so much o birthday ikea assignment new apt solar cells summer water park fixing yard veg grdn emily birthday cyn training ikea ws

Is there anything we can do to help us remember more than eight to ten episodic memories from this year?

GET OUT OF YOUR ROUTINE.

GET OFF YOUR DEVICES, AND LOOK UP.

FEEL IT.

REHASH IT.

KEEP A JOURNAL.

USE SOCIAL MEDIA.