Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting

by Lisa Genova

There are two main ways to resist the effects of time on memory: repetition and meaning.

If you want to retain the information you’ve managed to store in your brain, keep activating it. Revisit the information again and again. Reminisce, rehearse, and repeat. You can significantly decrease the amount of memory that will be lost to time by repetition to the point of overlearning.

If you take what you want to remember and wrap a story around it, making associations with what you already know and care about, or if you place it in a special moment in your life’s narrative, you will make that memory resistant to forgetting.

forgetting isn’t always a regrettable sign of aging, a pathological symptom of dementia, a shameful failure, a maladaptive problem to solve, or even accidental.

Forgetting is quite important; it helps us function every day in all kinds of ways.

Sometimes we need to forget one thing in order to pay attention to—and remember—another, and so in this way, forgetting can facilitate better memory.

We also tend to think of forgetting as our default setting. Unless you actively do something to remember some piece of information, your brain will automatically forget it. Easily.

forgetting can also be artful—active, deliberate, motivated, targeted, and desirable.

An intelligent memory system not only remembers information but also actively forgets whatever is no longer useful.

Every time I push a carriage full of bagged groceries out of the store, I have to remember, Where did I park my car? If in this moment, I retrieve where I parked last month and last week and yesterday, I’ll have too much irrelevant information online, and I won’t know where to go. I only want to retrieve where I parked today.

We tend to think of remembering as the challenge, but forgetting can be difficult, too.

one way of intentionally forgetting is to not pay attention in the first place. Look away. Don’t listen. Create a diversion. The information won’t get encoded. This is the fingers-in-your-ears, la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you method of intentionally forgetting.

i literally do this out loud when people say email adresses or phone numbers out loud

We tend to selectively consolidate and then remember the good qualities about ourselves and actively exclude and therefore forget the bad.

Feel i do the opposite

if you want to forget a memory that was already consolidated and has made its way into long-term storage? In this case, you want to avoid exposure to the cues and context that will trigger its retrieval.

So in essence remove all memories?

People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can’t stop retrieving, reliving, and reconsolidating unwanted memories, and unfortunately, these individuals unwittingly strengthen these memories with every unwelcome recall.

Another potential and possibly more promising approach to forgetting traumatic memories asks the person to continue to revisit the memory with the intention of introducing changes.

Did that in therapy

When performing optimally, memory doesn’t remember everything.

We forget because we didn’t pay attention, because we don’t have the right cues or context, because what happened was routine or inconsequential, because we never practiced, because we didn’t get enough sleep or are too stressed out, or because too much time has passed.

Muscle memories are stable through the ages. Your execution of what you know how to do, however, might not be what it used to be. The muscles of your body might be weaker and less flexible, your reaction time is probably slower, and you can’t see and hear as well as you did when you were younger.

Intact recognition also reveals that this semantic information is still safely stored in my brain and that this memory hasn’t vanished with age.

Episodic memory recall also decreases normally as we age. We forget more of what happened, but what we can recall is as accurate (and inaccurate) as younger people’s recollections.

Your ability to sustain attention also decreases as you age. So you’re less able to block out distracting stimuli when you’re fifty than when you were thirty, and because you need to pay attention to create new memories, your ability to remember suffers.

Paying attention is the number one thing you can do to improve your memory at any age, and a lack of attention will impair it.

Memory retrieval is far easier, faster, and more likely to be fully summoned when the context of recall matches the context that was present when the memory was formed.

prospective (what you plan to do), episodic (what happened), semantic (information you know), and muscle (how to do things) memories.

We’re all more likely to accurately remember something if learning and recall happen under the same conditions.

context means more than just where you were when you formed or recalled a memory. It can also mean whom you were with, the time of day or year, the weather. Nor is it limited to what’s outside of you. Context can be internal—your emotional or physiological state.

It’s much easier to recall memories that match the mood you’re in.

if you learn something when you’re caffeinated, then your memory for what you learned will be best if you’re caffeinated when trying to recall it.

how does an acute stressor affect memory? In a nutshell, it helps you form new memories about the stressful situation you’re in, but it impairs your ability to retrieve memories already made.

Acute stress generally facilitates the formation of new memories.

a brief burst of something stressful increases your attention, and as you know from earlier in the book, paying attention is essential for the formation of memories.

while exposure to acute stress enhances the formation of new memories, it doesn’t boost your ability to remember everything. Because our senses and attention become heightened but narrowed during the fight-or-flight response, the menu of details available for consolidation into memory is also narrowed. So we show an enhanced memory for information central to the stressful situation but worse memory for details in the periphery.

while acute stress improves memory formation for the central details of the stressful experience, it does not facilitate memory formation for neutral information.

stress doesn’t enhance the formation of memories unrelated to the stressor.

Many studies demonstrate that stress jams up memory retrieval. For example, subjects given cortisol show deficits in fetching previously learned information compared with subjects given saline.

Is chronic stress ever good for your memory? No. In fact, unrelenting stress is disastrous for your memory.

under chronic stress, you’re going to have a hard time thinking clearly. Even more concerning, if you’re under constant stress, you’ll start losing neurons in your hippocampus.

Chronic stress inhibits neurogenesis in the hippocampus.

With respect to memory, sleep plays a critical role in many ways. First, you need sleep to pay attention. If you don’t get enough sleep tonight, your frontal cortex is going to be dragging itself to its desk job in the morning, and your ability to concentrate is going to be sluggish.

the first step in creating a memory is noticing what you’re going to remember.

Without any additional practice, you will be better at what you’re learning to do after you’ve slept.

Many studies show that people become increasingly worse at learning new things as the day wears on. Unless they nap.

Unlike your cortex, your hippocampus doesn’t have infinite storage capacity. Say you’re cramming for an exam tomorrow, and you’re trying to memorize massive amounts of information. Hypothetically, you can max out your hippocampus. So consolidating even a few of your newly made memories during a nap might free up some much-needed space for consolidating new stuff.

no studies have demonstrated that drinking any amount of red wine reduces your risk of Alzheimer’s. On the flip side, drinking alcohol of any kind is likely to increase your risk of Alzheimer’s by interfering with the quality and quantity of your sleep.

Like the research on red wine, the studies on chocolate and Alzheimer’s to date have been too poorly designed to produce any useful conclusions.

drinking three to five cups of coffee per day at midlife was associated with a 65 percent decreased risk of Alzheimer’s.

People with low vitamin D are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s as are folks with normal vitamin D levels.

A B12 deficiency can cause dementia symptoms that look a lot like Alzheimer’s, but these memory impairments are in fact not Alzheimer’s in origin.

coconut oil has not been shown to have any effect on forgetting due to Alzheimer’s.