Complete Guide to Memory Quotes

“Do whatever you have to, to keep yourself reading.”
― Richard Restak, Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“The government, along with social media, contribute to this collective amnesia by providing false information that can not only pollute our present perceptions, but also lead to the formation within our minds of false memories. “We live in an expository society that feeds the government our personal data and gives the tech companies the power to use it in countless other ways—and, for the most part, we expose ourselves knowingly, willingly and with all our passion and our pleasure,” writes Bernard Harcourt, author of Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age. Nor is there much chance that the surveillance society mushrooming around us is likely to diminish the distortion of our collective memories. Some of the applications are for the good, others harmful, and others yet to be determined. But no one would disagree that tracking technology ranging from surveillance cameras to smart phones is here to stay.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Much of our culture is now locked into a mindset known as presentism: An uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes and beliefs, especially the tendency to interpret and judge past events and people in terms of current values and concepts. Presentism, like amnesia for the future, involves a loss of the ability to fully appreciate the myriad ways our current attitudes and beliefs contribute to misjudgments about the past.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“In America today, anyone over fifty lives in dread of the Big A—Alzheimer’s disease. Small social gatherings (dinner, cocktail parties, etc.) take on the atmosphere of a segment from NPR’s weekly quiz show “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me.” That’s the one where guests vie with each other in intense competitions to be the first to come up with the names of such things as the actor playing a role in the latest mini-series everybody is binging on. Almost inevitably, someone will pull out a cellphone to check the accuracy of the person who responded first. Quick, quicker, quickest lest others suspect you of coming down with the initial symptoms of the Big A. Although Alzheimer’s disease is not nearly as common as many people fear, nevertheless worries about perceived memory lapses are increasingly expressed to friends. They are also the most common complaint that persons over fifty-five years of age bring to their doctors. Such memory concerns are often unjustified and arouse needless anxiety. This widespread anxiety has helped create a national pre-occupation with memory and signs of memory failure. One of the reasons for this panic is the confusion in many people’s minds about how we form memories.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“The important point is that you can see the loci links with photographic clarity. Best wishes in your efforts to significantly enhance your memory. The sooner you begin applying the principles and techniques suggested in this book, the sooner you will reach that goal. The most important thing? Make memory improvement not just a fanciful wish, but a daily activity. GLOSSARY Amygdala An almond-shaped structure just in front of the hippocampus.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Exercise research over the past two decades has established the value of regular exercise. Initial claims that strenuous exercise was required to gain the benefits is no longer believed. In a representative study by Nathan Feder of the Federal University of Pelotas in Brazil, 82,872 volunteers were equally divided between men and women with the median age of 63.9 years. In this English Longitudinal Study of Aging conducted from 2002 to 2019, the results demonstrated that physical activity was associated with a lower risk for dementia.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“COFFEE AND TEA Recent research suggests that both coffee and tea consumption are associated with a lower incidence of dementia. Particularly interesting is the finding that those who drink two or three cups of coffee and the same amount of tea showed the greatest reduction, according to the figures released in November 2021 by the UK Biobank. This study analyzed coffee and tea consumption as related to stroke and dementia risk. Among the 365,682 participants, those who drank two to three cups of coffee per day and two to three cups of tea per day lowered their dementia risk by 28 percent.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“The MIND diet is another brain-oriented diet that is a bit more regimented than the Mediterranean diet: Each day you eat three servings of whole grains such as quinoa, barley, buckwheat, brown rice etc; a salad free of any fattening caloric dressing; and another vegetable accompanied, if you wish, by a glass of wine. Snacks consist of nuts with an added half cup of beans every other day. Twice a week you can eat poultry and a half-cup of berries. At least once a week broiled or baked fish should be eaten.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“may confer additional benefit compared to limiting yourself to one. Fermented foods: When adding foods to a culture of microorganisms, the sugar in the food can be transformed into lactic acid that encourages the growth of helpful bacteria in the gut. These can include miso, kombucha, kefir, yogurt, and sauerkraut. Leafy greens: They contain folate, a B vitamin that aids neurotransmitter function. Included here are arugula, watercress, spinach, Swiss chard, dandelion greens, and lettuce. How best to incorporate these suggested foods into a healthy diet? A Mediterranean diet is high in vegetables, fruits, legumes, beans, nuts, cereals, grains, fish, and unsaturated fats, along with olive oil as a substitute for butter.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Forgetfulness is especially worrying to us because of the fear that our memory failures may be the result of a degenerative brain disease like Alzheimer’s. In most cases, such fears are unfounded: the occasional “senior moment” is commonly experienced by perfectly normal people as they age. Rather than a sign of mental decline, these episodes of temporary forgetfulness may be a side effect of the mountains of information that the brain has taken in and processed over the years.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Today, technology both helps and hinders the development of a superpower memory. Think of the technology of audio and visual recorders, computers, and electronic diaries as extensions of the brain. Thanks to these aids we can carry incredible amounts of information around with us. While this increase in readily available information is generally beneficial, there is also a downside. The storage and rapid retrieval of information from a cellphone or an iPad or a computer also exerts a stunting effect on our brain’s memory capacities. We have to constantly try to overcome this by working at improving our memory. This not only will enhance our powers of recall, but will also strengthen our brain’s circuits starting at the hippocampus and extending to every other part of the brain.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“One can go even further and claim working memory is the system by which events become consciously experienced. So, memory is not only crucial to identity, but forms the basis for conscious experience. Please read that previous sentence again because it is one of the most important sentences in this book. Memory is not only crucial to identity, but forms the basis for conscious experience. So what could be a better reason for enhancing working memory?”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“is what is occurring in working memory,” according to Steve Joordens, Professor of Psychology, University of Toronto Scarborough.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Most important is working memory. Indeed, one could argue that “consciousness”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“All of the learning methods suggested in this book (rhyming, methods of loci, etc.) involve a conscious decision to use one memory method rather than another.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Here is an overview and survey of what we have covered so far: Encoding is the basis for all voluntarily retrievable memory. Without encoding, recall is impossible. All encoding is initially episodic (something happening to you, an episode); if repeated often enough, the information in memory is transferred to semantic memory (general knowledge); or procedural memory (how to do something). Working memory involves maintaining and manipulating information until it’s transferred to long-term memory in one of its three categories (episodic, semantic, and procedural). Here is a diagram illustrating the interrelations. All three of these (episodic, semantic, and procedural) are part of long-term memory.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Here is an overview and survey of what we have covered so far: Encoding is the basis for all voluntarily retrievable memory. Without encoding, recall is impossible. All encoding is initially episodic (something happening to you, an episode); if repeated often enough, the information in memory is transferred to semantic memory (general knowledge); or procedural memory (how to do something).”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Multiple displays are even more efficient: 56 percent more information is recalled when presented on multiple monitors rather than on a single screen. When”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“But the most effective acronyms are rhyming ones. That’s because when we rhyme or sing information, our brains learn more quickly. My guess is (nobody knows for sure) that additional brain areas are recruited when we sing or rhyme. As a result, training methods in industry or advertising or schools use a creative shorthand for conveying information—simply write down the facts or names you are trying to memorize, and use the first letters of each word to create a silly sentence. For”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“The easiest and most common way of memorizing involves coming up with a catchphrase involving all of the elements that you are trying to remember.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Of the two memory systems, episodic memory is the most fragile and most prone to error. Inherently we know this, especially when stating something as a fact that we are uncertain about. This may cause us to respond, depending on the circumstances, with uncertainty and expressions of anxiety (our heart may miss a beat, we may experience a sense uneasiness in our abdomen). All because we are not entirely certain of the correctness of our answer. What should we do in such circumstances? If we are uncertain about the information provided by our episodic memory, we are better off in most cases, going with our “gut” and trusting that our intuition is correct. Why?”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“When you place an item in memory, it’s as if you’re sending a message to your future self,” according to Robert Jacobs, a professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. “This channel has limited capacity, however, and thus it can’t transmit all details of a message. Consequently, a message retrieved from memory at a later time may not be the same as the message placed into memory at the earlier time. That is why memory errors occur.” Jacobs conceives of memory as a kind of communication channel which, like all communication channels, may break down. For instance, the brain is designed to favor filling in details when only the gist of an experience can be recalled. Was the Shelby Mustang I considered buying last month outfitted with a manual or an automatic transmission? If I don’t remember, it’s natural to “mentally fill in the missing details with the most frequent or commonplace properties,” says Jacobs. The car must have been equipped with a manual transmission because I don’t think Shelby ever made a car with an automatic transmission, I conclude, although I’m not all that sure of my memory for this fact and this car could be an exception or a conversion. In J. G. Ballard’s dystopian novel Rushing to Paradise, he writes of the dangers of a “collective amnesia for the future. . . . a willed refusal to face the imminent.” Could this failure in future memory be part of the explanation for our response to the threat of Global Warming?”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Neuroscience has shown that Carroll and Orwell were on to something. Brain scans suggest that every time we imagine a future possibility, we encode that imagined future into our memory. This involves the creation of a new memory, which when incorporated into the association network provides contact with the neuronal network formed during the creation of our earlier memories. The formation of the new memory is like an improv theater routine that varies in content according to time, cast, and circumstances. This variation is one of the reasons why people sharing the same experiences often remember events differently. It also goes a long way towards explaining why our memories—especially personal, emotionally nuanced memories—may sometimes be wrong.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“The take-home message from the Forgotten Baby Syndrome and the bus driver’s near catastrophic experience is that you should be wary whenever you are deviating from your usual routine. At such times monitor yourself, lest your procedural memory routines take over. Think of procedural memory and the habits thus formed as a default state. If you don’t self-monitor, you’ll do what you have always done previously. This can lead to unexpected and unnecessarily tragic disasters. Be alert to this potential memory peril.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Games offer another avenue for strengthening working memory. Bridge and chess are stand-out examples of keeping past, present, and future memories (based on evaluations of past games and the future consequences of the decisions made during those past games). My favorite working memory game is Twenty Questions.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Incidentally, I have noticed over my years as a neurologist and neuropsychiatrist that people with early dementia, as one of the first signs of the encroaching illness, often stop reading fiction. They can no longer keep the characters or plot development “in mind” (in their working memory). A second early sign of incipient dementia (while we are on the subject) relates to cooking. Unable to retain and employ working memory, the sufferer can no longer follow a recipe. Especially hard are measuring the ingredients and timing their entry into the meal being prepared. Bottom line: keep reading and cooking as spurs to maintaining your working memory.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“Tammet’s memory system is partly based on synesthesia: one type of sensory stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the visualization of a number or a letter evokes the visualization of a color or a taste.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“elaboration. The more meaning you can give to a thing to be remembered, the more successful you will be in recalling it.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“the “magic number seven” applied to digits, words, pictures, and even complex ideas.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind

“people’s ability to make judgements across a range of stimuli is limited to about seven alternative states.”
― Richard Restak, The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind