Remember

Lisa Genova (2021).? Remember: The science of memory and the art of forgetting.? Harmony Books: New York

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2? of all the complex and wondrous miracles that your brain executes, memory is king

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3? memory is far from perfect

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7? Effective remembering often requires forgetting

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8? attention is essential for creating a memory for anything

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15? jellyfish … meat tenderizer … make a paste … rub it on the sting … this really works

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16? Creating a memory takes place in four basic steps: Encoding … Consolidation … Storage … Retrieval

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20-21? While you need a hippocampus to form new memories, once they are made … They are distributed throughout the parts of the brain that registered the initial experience

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24? We remember memories; we don’t replay them

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26? If we want to remember something … we need to notice what is going on.? Noticing requires two things: perception … and attention

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29? The number one reason for forgetting … is lack of attention

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34? Paying attention requires conscious effort

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35? Minimizing or removing things that distract you will improve your memory

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38? prefrontal cortex … Working memory only holds what you are paying attention to right now … It’s a limited and short-lived holding space

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41? The holding capacity of working memory was first determined by George Miller in 1956 … We can only remember seven plus or minus two things for fifteen to thirty seconds

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48? long-term memory … is thought to have limitless duration and capacity

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

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52-53? the term muscle memory is a misnomer … It’s in your brain

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53? stuff we know … declarative memories

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59? Repetition is the key to muscle memory mastery

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64? semantic memory, is memory for the knowledge you’ve learned … episodic memories … personal and always about the past

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65? Creating a long-lasting semantic memory typically requires studying and practice, often with the intentional goal of retaining the information

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66-67? If the total number of hours is equal, distributed practice beats out cramming … the spacing effect … Spacing also gives you a better opportunity to self-test, which … dramatically strengthens the circuitry of this memory … don’t pull an all-nighter before a test

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68? test yourself … Repeated testing beats repeated studying

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69? Meaning matters when it comes to creating and recalling any kind of memory

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71? Your brain isn’t interested in knowing what’s boring or unpleasant.? If you want to know more stuff, make the information meaningful to you.? Attaching meaning is how mnemonics work … take advantage of at least one of your brain’s two greatest talents – visual imagery and remembering where things are located in space

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73? A … practical technique for memorizing … lists … is called the method of loci or memory palace

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75? Regular use of these tools – repetition, spaced learning, self-testing, meaning, and visual and spatial imagery – will no doubt strengthen your semantic memory

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78? Episodic memory … is the history of you remembered by you

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78-79? forgotten life experiences … are routine … We don’t hold on to what is ordinary, typical, or expected

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79? our brains are … phenomenal at remembering what is meaningful, what is emotional, and what surprises us

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81? Life events infused with emotion are what we tend to remember long term

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82? Emotion and surprise activate … the amygdala, which, when stimulated, sends powerful signals to your hippocampus

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86? we remember almost nothing before the age of three and very little before the age of six

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86? 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

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87? We can still remember what happened from the past couple of years … recency effect

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87? most of life’s episodic memories are likely to be clustered between the ages of fifteen and thirty … the reminiscence bump

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87-88? a few people in this world … with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM) can recall the details of what happened from almost every day of their lives from late childhood on … (fewer than one hundred people in the world have been identified)

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91? Most people only remember eight to ten events for any given year

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92-95? 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 … photos … LIFE-LOG

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95? episodic memory … emotion, surprise, meaning, reflection, and reminiscing … your memories for what happened … are wrong

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99? Your episodic memories are chock-full of distortions, additions, omissions, elaborations, confabulations, and other errors

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100? your memory for what happened is vulnerable to editing and inaccuracies

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101? And every time we retrieve a stored memory for what happened, it’s highly likely that we change the memory

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102? through leading questions our brains can be duped into believing they remember something we never even experienced in the first place

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104? an episodic memory becomes vulnerable to outside influence every time we retrieve it … The most common … is language: the words we, and others, use

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107? Writing something down allows you to rehearse and therefore strengthen the memory for the details you choose to write about, but this action can also unwittingly prevent you from rehearsing, and therefore later remembering, any details you didn’t include.? Putting any sensory experience into words distorts and narrows the original memory of the experience

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108? Likewise, even talking about your memory of what happened slices the memory thinner

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113? You can be 100 percent confident in your vivid memory and still be 100 percent wrong

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116? your memory for what happened might be right, completely wrong, or somewhere in between

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118? One of the most common experiences of memory failure is known as blocking or tip of the tongue (TOT)

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120? During a TOT experience … You also might come up with a loosely related word … Psychologists call these obliquely related words the ugly sisters of the target, and unfortunately, zeroing in on an ugly sister unwittingly makes the situation worse

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123? The frequency of TOTs we experience does normally increase with age … But we notice them more when we’re older

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125-126? In the hierarchy of Things People Tend to Forget, proper names are significantly more vulnerable to blocking than are common words … the Baker/baker paradox … Baker as a last name is an abstract concept … many of us are bad at remembering names but not at recalling other details about a person

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132? Prospective memory is your memory for what you need to do later … to-do list … generally speaking, our brains are terrible at remembering to remember

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133? Prospective memories rely on external cues to trigger their recall

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134? Marketing companies take advantage of our prospective memory vulnerabilities all the time

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137? Prospective memory is unreliable in all of us … In 2013 … U.S. … reported 772 surgical instruments forgotten and left inside patients over the previous eight years

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138-143? To err is human, especially if you’re relying on your prospective memory

MAKE TO-DO LISTS … check them …

ENTER THE INFORMATION INTO YOUR CALENDAR …

BE SPECIFIC ABOUT YOUR PLAN … an implementation intention …

USE PILLBOXES …

PLACE YOUR CUES IN IMPOSSIBLE-TO-MISS LOCATIONS …

BE AWARE IF YOUR ROUTINE HAS BEEN DISRUPTED

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146? If you don’t revisit the memory … that memory will erode with the passage of time

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147-148? the [Hermann] Ebbinghaus forgetting curve … although the information we encode into memory degrades rapidly with the passage of time, it doesn’t entirely disappear

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

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151? But maybe you want to forget something … If you can find the discipline to leave these memories alone, they will eventually fade

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156? Forgetting is quite important; it helps us function every day in all kinds of ways … forgetting can facilitate better memory

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158? forgetting can be difficult, too

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159? there are … ways to actively forget what we don’t want to keep … Motivated redirection of attention is a powerful way to ensure that an experience or information won’t be retained

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160? We possess a positivity bias with respect to how we see ourselves.? We tend to selectively consolidate and then remember the good qualities about ourselves and actively exclude and therefore forget the bad

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160-161? People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTST) … can’t stop remembering … They can’t forget … By taking advantage of episodic memory’s proclivity for editing, maybe painful memories could be replaced by kinder, gentler, emotionally neutral versions of what happened

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163? An optimally functioning memory system involves … remembering and forgetting … Our ability to forget is likely to be just as vital as our ability to remember

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167? aging doesn’t degrade muscle memory … older adults possess a larger repository of semantic memories (vocabulary and learned information) … And we continue to be able to consolidate and store semantic memories as we age

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168? Normal, age-related forgetting is most pronounced with TOT

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168? Episodic memory recall also decreases normally as we age

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169? Your ability to sustain attention also decreases as you age

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170? we show an increasing tendency to recall the good stuff and forget the bad

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170? These declines in memory creation, retrieval, and processing speed aren’t all inevitable, are they? … yes

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171? eat a Mediterranean or a MIND diet (a combination of the Mediterranean diet and DASH diet …), exercise regularly, meditate daily, and sleep for eight hours a night

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177? Alzheimer’s … most neuroscientists believe the disease begins when a protein called amyloid beta starts forming plaques in our synapses … We think it takes fifteen to twenty years of seemingly innocent amyloid plaque accumulation before it reaches a tipping point

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178? Alzheimer’s begins in the hippocampus

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179? Failure to retrieve the right words is another early symptom of Alzheimer’s

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180? people with Alzheimer’s start to use simpler and simpler words

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182-183? people with Alzheimer’s start getting lost in familiar places … individuals experience impairments in logical thinking, decision-making, planning, and problem-solving

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183? People with Alzheimer’s start misplacing their keys … Forgetting what keys are used for is a semantic memory failure that could be a symptom of disease pathology in your memory system

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185? grief, rage, and lust might become dysregulated and disinhibited

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185? Progression from the first symptoms of forgetting to end-stage Alzheimer’s takes an average of eight to ten years

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189? 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 … rehearsal, self-testing, visual and spatial imagery, mnemonics, surprise, emotion, and meaning all improve memory

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190-191? Forgetting the reason you’ve walked into a room is one of the most common memory failure complaints … 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 … with prospective … episodic … semantic … and muscle … memories

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194? It’s much easier to recall memories that match the mood you’re in … Similarly, 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 … The context – both external and internal – becomes part of the memory

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197? Approximately 79 percent of Americans say they feel stress sometimes or frequently every single day

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198? Is stress good or bad for memory?? Like context, it depends

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199-200? The two workhorse stress hormones released by your adrenal glands are adrenaline and cortisol.? Adrenaline is a fast-acting, short-lived … cortisol is busiest fifteen minutes to an hour after the onset of the stressor.? Cortisol mobilizes glucose … it also shuts off the entire stress response

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200? you need this stress response to function normally every day

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200? an acute stressor … helps you form new memories about the stressful situation … but it impairs your ability to retrieve memories already made

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200-203? First, a brief burst of something stressful increases your attention … Second … adrenaline and cortisol also activate the release of a neurotransmitter called norepinephrine in your amygdala.? In response, your amygdala sends a signal to your hippocampus … to promote memory consolidation … we show an enhanced memory for information central to the stressful situation but worse memory for details in the periphery … And stress doesn’t enhance the formation of memories unrelated to the stressor … stress jams up memory retrieval … unrelenting stress is disastrous for your memory … The shut off valve in your hypothalamus soon becomes desensitized to the presence of so much cortisol and stops responding

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204? stress inhibits your prefrontal cortex, impairing your ability to think

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204? Chronic stress inhibits neurogenesis in the hippocampus

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205? women who reported experiencing chronic stress had a 65 percent increased risk of Alzheimer’s.? In another study, people under chronic stress were twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease as were people who felt less stress, and the chronically stressed people were ten times more likely to develop cognitive impairment over five years

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205-206? we can dramatically influence our brain’s and body’s response to each stressful situation … yoga, meditation, a healthy diet, exercise, and practices in mindfulness, gratitude, and compassion … the hippocampi in the brains of people who meditated for thirty minutes a day were significantly bigger after eight weeks

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208? Sleep is a biologically busy state that is vital to your health

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209? you need sleep to pay attention

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209? Sleep helps consolidate new memories

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210-211? In addition to improving episodic and semantic memories, sleep also optimizes muscle memory … Sleep appears to be helpful for all muscle memory skills … Without any additional practice, you will be better at what you’re learning to do after you’ve slept … There is also power in napping … napping can give you an edge in performance that same day, but it doesn’t beat what will be gained from a full night’s sleep

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212? your hippocampus doesn’t have infinite storage capacity … A twenty-minute nap should be enough time to give you plenty of memory-boosting benefits without risking the grogginess of sleep inertia that often follows lengthier midday slumbers

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213? A growing body of evidence suggests that sleep is critical for reducing your risk of Alzheimer’s disease … Normally, amyloid is cleared away and metabolized by glial cells … During deep sleep … sleep deprivation can lead to an increase in amyloid and tau (another predictive biomarker for Alzheimer’s) in cerebral spinal fluid

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214? And amyloid accumulation has been shown to disrupt sleep … a … feedback loop that accelerates plaque formation … Insufficient sleep is likely to be a significant risk factor in the development of Alzheimer’s

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214? Human adults … require seven to nine hours of sleep per night

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215? According to a 1942 Gallup poll, U.S. adults were getting an average of 7.9 hours of sleep per night … Today, adults in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Japan sleep an average of about 6.5 hours per night … We need seven to nine hours a night

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217-218? Age is the number one risk factor for Alzheimer’s … Alzheimer’s is not a part of normal aging … Alzheimer’s is caused by a combination of the genes we inherited and how we live

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218? some strategies for prevention

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218? people who eat foods from the Mediterranean diet or the MIND diet (a combination of the Mediterranean diet and DASH …) cut their risk of Alzheimer’s disease by anywhere from a third to a half … green leafy vegetables, brightly colored berries, nuts, olive oil, whole grains, beans, and fish

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219? There simply is no compelling data to support the contention that red wine reduces your risk of Alzheimer’s or other dementias … 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

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219? Chocolate has been shown to improve attention (via caffeine) … But as of now, there is no compelling evidence that shows that chocolate reduces your risk of Alzheimer’s

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220? In one longitudinal epidemiological study … drinking three to five cups of coffee per day at midlife was associated with a 65 percent decreased risk of Alzheimer’s.? We don’t know … if tea offers the same benefit … be mindful of when you drink your last latte of the day

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220? People with low vitamin D are twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s

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220-221? coconut oil has not been shown to have any effect on forgetting due to Alzheimer’s.? Likewise, ginkgo biloba does not reduce your risk of dementia

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221? As a rule of thumb, anything that is good for your heart is good for your brain – and for preventing Alzheimer’s

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221? chronic sleep deprivation is a significant risk factor for Alzheimer’s

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222? If you do nothing else to lower your risk of Alzheimer’s, exercise.? Aerobic exercise … Both physical exercise and mental engagement have been shown to stimulate the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus … the first brain region under attack by Alzheimer’s

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223-224? learn new things … An average brain has over a hundred trillion synapses … We gain and lose synapses all the time through neural plasticity … People who have more years of formal education, who have greater literacy, and who engage regularly in socially and mentally stimulating activities have more cognitive reserve … These folks have a reduced risk of being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s

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227? Memory is essential for the functioning of almost everything you do

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228? Memory is everything and nothing … take it seriously but hold it lightly

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229? Who’s right?? Who knows?? Who cares?? You’re probably both wrong.? Let it go

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230? Having a remarkable memory doesn’t guarantee happiness or success

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232? You don’t need memory to love and feel loved … Take it seriously.? Hold it lightly.? Memory isn’t everything

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233-246?

1.????? PAY ATTENTION …

2.????? SEE IT …

3.????? MAKE IT MEANINGFUL …

4.????? USE YOUR IMAGINATION …

5.????? LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION …

6.????? MAKE IT ABOUT YOU … the superiority illusion … Make what you’re learning personal …

7.????? LOOK FOR THE DRAMA …

8.????? MIX IT UP … If you want to remember more of what happens, step out of your routine …

9.????? PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT …

10.? USE PLENTY OF STRONG RETRIEVAL CUES …

11.? BE POSITIVE …

12.? EXTERNALIZE YOUR MEMORY … lists, pillboxes, calendars, sticky notes … Tom Gruber … “… You don’t lose memory by augmenting it.” …

13.? CONTEXT MATTERS …

14.? CHILL OUT …

15.? GET ENOUGH SLEEP …

16.? WHEN TRYING TO REMEMBER SOMEONE’S NAME, TURN YOUR Bakers INTO bakers