Physical activity, mindfulness exercises and new experiences can all help to improve our memory. — dpa
They're minor, everyday memory lapses, but can be maddening: Where did you put the car keys? What was it that you wanted to say?
Is there something wrong with your memory?
The neural mechanisms of memory aren’t designed to remember things like the name of someone we met at a party, according to Charan Ranganath, a professor of neuroscience and psychology and director of the memory and plasticity programme at the University of California, Davis, in the United States.
So it’s normal to forget them.
“Memory is the process by which our brains extract what’s important, that is, information that helps us make sense of an uncertain and ever-changing world,” he writes in an article published in the New York-based business magazine Fast Company.
“We tend to focus on our shortcomings when it comes to memory, but for the most part, we do a pretty good job of remembering what we need to, thanks to the prefrontal cortex,” he says.
The front part of the brain – the prefrontal cortex – coordinates activity across different neural networks and “plays a starring role in many of our day-to-day memory successes and failures”, he explains.
Unfortunately, it’s one of the first brain regions to decline as we age, he adds, and its function is made worse when we multitask, are stressed, don’t get enough sleep or have certain adverse health conditions, including diabetes and depression.
But we can improve its function with exercise and mindfulness practices, as well as by eliminating distractions such as text and email alerts, wearing a hearing aid if necessary, learning by doing rather than memorising, taking on challenging mental tasks and diversifying what Prof Ranganath calls our brain’s “training data”.
To do this, he says we need to “update our knowledge” by going to new places, interacting with different people and exposing ourselves to a wide range of ideas, which will enrich our episodic memory (the ability to recall past events) and enable us to adapt to new situations more rapidly.
“Conversely, when we spend too much time interacting with the same people, in the same places and situations, we have impoverished memories,” he says.
“For instance, during the pandemic lockdowns, as we spent each day sitting in the same room, interacting with the same people (mostly over screens), the days seemed to go on forever, and yet, by the end of the week, we were left with few memories of what we did during that time.” – dpa
