A new book by a brain expert offers a few simple things you can do to protect your memory as you age.
Protect your memory using these five tips from a brain expert.
“He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good and that thanks to this artifice, we manage to endure the burden of the past.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera
I FEAR THAT AS I AGE, MY MEMORY WILL DECLINE. Neuroscientist Dr. Richard Restak reminds us that memory decline is not inevitable.
Today, I want to share some tips and tricks to manage memory from Dr. Restak’s latest book, “The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind.” We’ll explore tools such as:
- sleep habits
- diet
- mental exercises
Look at Dr. Restak’s 10 “sins,” or stumbling blocks that can lead to distorted or lost memories. Of these, Harvard psychologist and memory specialist Dr. Daniel Lawrence Schacter first described seven sins of omission (for example, absent-mindedness), while Dr. Restak added three of his own.
Dr. Schacter’s research aims to “understand human memory’s function and nature using cognitive, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging approaches.” His research group is especially interested in better understanding the constructive nature of memory — why memory is not always accurate and how memory distortions can give insights into the working of memory.
Memory basics
Schacter (1999) has shown us that memory generally suffers from different “sins,” which we may classify into three main categories.
- Forgetting. Memories of events and facts usually become less accessible over time. As Simons and Taylor have explained, forgetting is likely to occur when we pay insufficient attention to a stimulus during encoding or retrieval. Even if a fact is deeply encoded (and not lost over time), it can be temporarily inaccessible — How often have you had some information on the tip-of-your tongue?
- Distortion or inaccuracy. Even when we correctly remember a fact from the past, we may misattribute it to a wrong source. If we hear tricky questions or suggestions as we try to recall something can alter the recollection of the actual event. Our memories can be distorted by our beliefs, expectations, current knowledge, and more.
- Pathologic remembrances. Here we remember facts or events even though we wish we did not. Traumatic events fit into this category. Memory is not a literal replaying of the past but a complex process of assembling and integrating information.
Have you seen the stunning film Rashomon (Japanese: 羅生門, Hepburn: Rashōmon)? This 1950 psychological thriller, directed and written by Akira Kurosawa (in close collaboration with cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa), describes the murder of a samurai in a forest.
The film is known for a plot device involving characters who provide subjective, alternative, and contradictory versions of the same incident. A priest and a woodcutter sit under the Rashomon city gate to stay dry in a downpour. Kichijiro Ueda, a commoner, joins them and begins to tell a disturbing story about rape and murder.
The woodcutter and the priest cannot understand how all involved offer radically different accounts of the same event. All three of the involved individuals offer that they alone committed the murder.
Neither the woodcutter nor the priest understands how everyone involved could have given radically different accounts of the same event, with all three of the people involved indicating that they, and they alone, committed the murder.
Watch Rashomon, one of the greatest films ever, and you will hear the perspectives of the woodcutter, bandit, a samurai, and the rape victim. For the last, listen as you hear a bolero, one requested by the director. Here’s Kurosawa’s overview of the film:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101128061133/http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/196-akira-kurosawa-on-rashomon
“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust
How you can protect your memory
Let’s look at a definition of memory, as The Derek Bok Center for Memory at Harvard (USA) provided. Memory is the ongoing process of information retention over time. Because it makes up the framework through which we make sense of and take action within the present, its importance goes without saying.
Memory lapses are sometimes not memory problems but can be attention ones. I sometimes forget the name of a doctor I met at a meeting, but it is sometimes the product of talking with several individuals at the time. I did not pay sufficient attention at the time.
What I might have done is visualize the word. Meeting Dr. Taylor, for example, I could visualize a tailor in a white coat in a shop with a sewing needle in his hand.
If I meet Dr. Mizuno, I envision the doctor sitting in the middle of a water field — Mizuno means “water field,” from a village in Owari (now part of Aichi prefecture). The surname is found mostly along the eastern seaboard and on the island of Okinawa.
2. Play games
Do you play chess or contract bridge? These challenging games are wonderful for memory, but Dr. Restak reminds us that simpler games can facilitate memory, too.
For example, in 20 Questions — a group (or individual) thinks of a person, place, or object, and the other person (the questioner) asks 20 questions in a yes-or-no fashion. To do well, the questioner must hold all of the previous answers in memory to guess the correct answer.
Engage your working memory by maintaining information and moving around within your mind. Can you name all American presidents, from President Biden backward to Franklin D. Roosevelt? What about the other direction? Restak suggests we do the same with Democratic presidents and then with Republican ones.
3. Read more novels
I love reading. Do you? One early indicator of memory problems can be giving up on reading novels and switching to non-fiction. We must stay actively engaged with fiction from the beginning to the end. It would be best to remember what the character did early on to understand later in the book.
I have such fond memories of reading Anna Karenina. Perhaps it is time to revisit this wonderful tome. Who doesn’t enjoy a telling of juicy subjects such as marriage plots, adultery, gambling, and Russian feudalism?
Or maybe it is time to re-read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, in which the novel’s never-named African-American narrator believes he is “invisible” to others socially. We learn of his move from the American South to college and then to New York City.
I love Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. You live one day in the life of British socialite Clarissa Dalloway. Woolf brilliantly weaves together a third-person narration and her characters’ thoughts with a stream-of-consciousness effort throughout. I feel as though I am in the minds of her characters.
Of course, there are so many wonderful contemporary novels. Where to start? Do you have a favorite novel?
4. Find common everyday memory challenges
What are some memory exercises we can weave into our daily lives? Have you made a grocery list and then memorized it? Bring the list with you, but when you get to the grocery store, see if you can pull off your shopping sans the list. Visualize the items in your mind. And if you cook frequently, you are improving your working memory.
Another trick? Turn off the GPS and navigate the old-fashioned way, from memory. You may slow declines in spatial memory. As you navigate a novel environment, you must consider your surroundings. You also must update your internal navigation system to get where you want to go.
Using GPS takes away these requirements, making navigation much less cognitively demanding. Travel with GPS, and you will gain less knowledge about those routes compared with people traveling the same routes who use a map.
5. Careful with technology
Technology is linked to two of Dr. Restak’s new “sins” of memory. He reminds us of so-called technological distortion, in which storing everything on our mobile phones means that we “don’t know it,” eroding our mental abilities.
Technology is also distracting. Tools such as social media are designed to be addictive to the user; as a result, we are often distracted by them. Can you stroll down the street without checking your cell phone? Do you live in the present moment, a condition critical to encoding memories?
Thank you for joining me today in exploring how you can protect your memory.
