Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting - A New York Times bestseller!

by Lisa Genova

Effective remembering often requires forgetting. And just because memory sometimes fails doesn’t mean it’s in any way broken.

You’ll learn that attention is essential for creating a memory for anything.

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

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.

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

Becoming an expert in any physical skill is a result of more neural connections, more brain matter devoted to that muscle memory.

Your episodic memories are chock-full of distortions, additions, omissions, elaborations, confabulations, and other errors. Basically, your memories for what happened are wrong.