You spent all that time planning, and now as you prepare to launch from the house this morning, all your plans have puffed into the gentle breeze of forgetting like the seeds blowing off a dry dandelion. Gone, gone, gone is the memory of that 9:30 a.m. phone call and the fact that your child is supposed to bring a white T-shirt to use in art class today. Gone even is the location of your car keys, though you vaguely remember that you set them somewhere odd. Could they be on the bathroom shelf? No, that’s not quite right. Maybe on the laundry room folding table? Almost. This section will help you hold on to your morning plans, even minutes or hours after you make them! Consider it a brief morning memory refresher.
Of course, the topic of memory is a huge one, and there are dozens of brain books written just on the subject of memory training alone. In part that’s because “memory” is actually a handful of related but not identical skills. The way you remember a smell is different from the way you remember how to shoot a free throw, which is different from the way you remember the list of your day’s activities.
But all types of memory share the three general stages of encoding, storage, and retrieval—how you put it in, hold on to it, and get it out—and for each of these stages there are ways you can learn to do it better. The key is hacking the brain structures involved in each task.
For example, your hippocampus is the structure that shoves facts into your head. Your senses take in experiences and then your hippocampus packages these experiences for storage deeper in the brain. The problem is, your senses bombard your hippocampus with more than it can possibly handle, and so it has to sort experiences into ones it will help you remember and ones you can immediately forget. The hippocampus does this by “tagging” things with little priority stickers. You can help your hippocampus tag the things you want to remember. For example, if you set your car keys in the refrigerator’s butter dish, you may never find them again, but simply saying to yourself “I am setting my car keys in the butter dish” forces the hippocampus to tag the memory with a higher priority. You are more likely to remember the things you do with consciousness than the things you do automatically or without really meaning to.
But if you want to store memories with absolute top priority, the tags of consciousness aren’t enough. For that, you need the tags of emotion. To get them, you’ll need the help of another brain structure—namely, the amygdala. Some people call the amygdala your “lizard brain,” because the two marble-shaped balls of the amygdalae are the home of fear and desire, the emotional learning centers of your brain. If you were trapped in an elevator when you were nine, it’s your amygdala that makes you claustrophobic now (it’s also the emotional response of the amygdala, balanced by rational thoughts from your prefrontal cortex that creates many of our decisions, as we’ll see later). And if you spent a horrified hour looking for the car keys that you accidentally threw out with the morning trash when late for an important meeting, it’s this emotional memory that can help you remember where you put them now. If you really want to remember anything, make it emotional.
MEMORY TIPS
+1 Tagging
+1 Emotion
–1 Stress
People who win memory competitions know this trick. To memorize the order of a shuffled pack of cards, memory champions tell themselves lewd and emotionally charged stories in which the cards are characters. You may not remember queen of diamonds, three of clubs, jack of spades, but you’re not likely to forget the storyline of Madonna showing her breasts to George Clooney (that is, if your brain includes Madonna’s “Material Girl” to represent the queen of diamonds, the image of a busty three of clubs, and George Clooney as a charming rascal like the jack of spades). It makes sense that emotional memories are lasting: remembering the fear you felt when you nearly fell from the upper branches of a tree can keep you from doing it again.
The only exception to the rule of emotion-is-memory is stress. If a memory is attached to a single stressful event, like the search for your keys, the event will be indelibly inked in your brain. But against a general backdrop of chronic stress, you don’t learn as well—it’s as if this stress takes over part of your ability to create new memories. So stress is a complex dance: specific stress paired with specific memory creates things like PTSD flashbacks, but a high general baseline of stress makes the events that take place in this soup harder to remember.
We’ve talked about encoding and storage, and now it’s time for recall—your ability to pull memories from storage deep in your brain. Long-term memory is retrieved by association. Something makes you think of something else, as in feeding your dog his meds smushed in a blob of butter and then suddenly remembering that you put your keys in the butter dish. Cued retrieval is also why the song “Stairway to Heaven” makes you think of middle school dances and why going to a baseball game could make an alcoholic fall off the wagon.
So to remember where you put your car keys this morning, you can try chilling out so that your memory isn’t plugged by stress, and you can try attaching emotions to these memories. Then, when these strategies don’t work, you give in to the realities of the modern brain and make a list. That’s cued retrieval: a couple of chicken scratches on paper can cue the information you need to remember. Or do the same thing with string tied around your finger or a small rock in your pocket. Now where did you put that list again?
fMRI tests of memory champions show that it’s spatial skills that let them work their magic, as if memory champions are walking through a complex house full of rooms rather than looking at a deck of cards. The house-full-of-rooms isn’t far from the actual strategy: by constructing a story with characters and movement, memory champions take abstract symbols and make them meaningful. For example, after competing in the 2006 World Memory Championships in the Examination Schools of Oxford University, twenty-three-year-old Ed Cooke told Discover Magazine how he does it: Cooke assigns each card a person, action, and thing—for example, the queen of clubs is his friend Henrietta, the action is whacking with handbags, and the thing is a closet full of designer clothes. He memorizes cards in groups of three—the first card is represented by the person, the second by the action, and the third by the image. So he might say, “Destiny’s Child is whacking Franz Schubert with handbags,” as in the Discover article. When trying to memorize abstract symbols or things, give them meaning—make these things represent emotionally charged memories and you will remember them.