The idea is that the more you re-learn or remind yourself of information again and again spaced out over time the better you’ll retain that information. Psychologists and others call this one the spacing effect. In one study in middle-age women with early signs of memory loss, starting a program of regular aerobic exercise actually increased the size of the hippocampus (a part of the brain known to be involved in the memory storing process) and improved verbal memory and learning scores when the women were tested.Īnd a new 2018 guideline from the American Academy of Neurology recommends regular exercise as one of the things people with mild memory problems should do to help stop those problems from getting worse or turn into serious neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia. What is exercise not good for? It’s important for your heart, your mood, your sleep and your mind, particularly the part of your mind involved in memory. The National Sleep Foundation recommends getting between seven and nine hours of sleep each night for optimal health and brain function. And that means missing out on sleep - or high enough quality sleep - can compromise some of those processes. Get a good night’s sleepĭecades of research support the fact that sleep is a critical time when memories consolidate and get stored. If you want to hone your own skills (whether that’s for memorizing Pi or better remembering names or facts), here’s what might help: 1. “No one suddenly wakes up one day being able to memorize 60,000 digits of Pi.” But training can definitely plays a role in memory, as is the case for people who compete in memory competitions, he adds.

Sure, some of what determines how well you remember things are the genes you’re born with, Kang says. “But at the same time it may not be the case that as much remembering as possible is always the best course either.” What you can do to help make memories stick “It’s not the case that as much forgetting as possible is good, obviously,” he says. Remembering the old number becomes useless and may make it more difficult to remember your friend’s new number. “Our brains may want us to remember the gist of what we’ve experienced because that will be most adaptive for making decisions in the real world.”įor example, let’s say you remember a friend’s phone number, but that friend moves away and gets a new phone number. “We found that there’s a variety of mechanisms the brain uses - and actually invests energy in - that undo and override those connections, ultimately cause us to forget information,” Richards says.Īnd that would mean that some “forgetting” is actually a very natural and normal process, rather than a “failure” of our memory, Richards says. In a recent paper, Richards and his colleague Paul Frankland, PhD, senior scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children and Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, looked at previous studies that have investigated the physical changes in the brain associated with memory - and why sometimes that process completes and sometimes it does not.

There may be a reason our brains forget things But as far as changing the physical processes in the brain that make memories stick, there’s likely not much you can do now to affect that, Richards says.Īnd that’s probably a good thing, he adds.

So there are strategies for better organizing what may at first glance appear to be unrelated information to connect it to what we already know to help us better remember things, according to Kang and others. “Do all of the molecular signals get transmitted to ensure that that cell changes physically?” “So the ultimate question, at the cellular level, as to whether or not a memory gets stored is does that process actually complete properly,” he explains. In the same way that when you store a grocery list on a piece of paper, you are making a physical change to that paper by writing words down, or when you store a file on a computer, you’re making a physical change somewhere in the magnetization of some part of your hard drive - a physical change happens in your brain when you store a memory or new information. And on a molecular level neuroscientists suspect that there’s actually a physical process that needs to be completed to form a memory - and us not remembering something is a result of that not happening, explains Blake Richards, DPhil, assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Memory train