When’s your doctor’s appointment? Did you lock the front door? Why did you walk into that room?
Forgetting such things is normal. Maybe you weren’t paying close enough attention to commit something to memory. Maybe it was so mundane — something you’ve done a hundred times — that the memory didn’t stand out.
“We’re not going to remember everything,” said Charan Ranganath, a professor at the Center for Neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California at Davis. “The issue isn’t how can I remember more, but how can I remember the information that matters?”
You may notice that you remember less as you age. With aging, normal changes in the brain — coupled with poor sleep, medical issues and certain medications — can lead to memory problems. “That decline can speed up if you have conditions like hypertension or diabetes,” Ranganath said.
But forgetfulness is also simply a result of having a lifetime of memories and needing a new one to stand out enough so that it can be stored in your brain, said Andrew Budson, a professor of neurology at Boston University.
“When we’re young, we’re happy to soak up all the information regardless of whether it will be important, and there really is a phenomenon that older people have learned to prioritize what they’re going to put into their memory stores. This just happens automatically. Whatever is unimportant, they’re just not going to bother trying to remember,” Budson said.
So what should you do to help yourself remember things? Using alarms, calendar notifications or handwritten notes are all effective ways to remind you of things you’ve checked off your list or tasks that you still have to do, research shows.
But you can also trick your brain into remembering something. Here are four strategies that experts recommend.
Make up a silly story
Connecting a silly, outrageous or outlandish mental image to something you want to memorize can help you remember it. If you want to ensure you remember that you turned off the stove, so you don’t worry about it throughout the day, for instance, imagine a big pink pig with wings swooping down and turning the knob, Ranganath said.
Past moments are easier to remember. Remembering things you need to do in the future — such as going to a dentist appointment after lunch — is harder for your brain. “Our memories, as interesting as this sounds, are not to remember what happened in the past. Our memories are built to use what happened in the past to help us to plan for the future,” Budson said.
But you can work around that. To remember the appointment, for example, Budson said he would picture himself eating a lunch composed of a sweet, sticky chocolate-and-toffee dessert — and his teeth coated in it.
“That’s going to be the last thing in the world that my dentist would want to know I was eating,” he said. Then later that day, when he’s eating his actual lunch, he’ll be more likely to remember the dental appointment.
Say it out loud, rap it or sing it
Research shows that speaking an action out loud and hearing yourself say it — known as the production effect — may have a positive effect on certain aspects of memory. A 2023 meta-analysis found that reading words aloud, for instance, helped with recognition memory — the ability to recognize information when you see it again.
“Instead of a visual snapshot, it’s like a little movie that has audio, as well,” said Budson, who was not involved in the study.
Group items together
The chunking method has been shown to help with memory tasks because your brain can juggle only a limited number of items for short-term tasks. Chunking reduces many smaller items into fewer larger items. Think about it: Your phone number, bank account number and Social Security number are all broken into chunks using hyphens, which can make them easier to recall.
If you want to try chunking a grocery list, instead of trying to remember each item, picture the parts of the store you’ll need to visit — say bakery, butcher or produce. Once you’re there, seeing the items may help you remember what you need. Or use a mnemonic device. You might remember this one from algebra class: PEMDAS (parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction).
Map items in a room
When you’re trying to memorize a list, try the memory palace method — a mnemonic in which you visualize items in a familiar area or route. Then when you picture that area, you may be able to remember the items.
If you need to pick up picnic foods from the grocery store, for instance, assign each item to a different room in your house or a different spot in the same room. Picture a ketchup bottle in your living room that has broken and is leaking on your rug, mustard smeared across your bathroom mirror, and hot dogs and hamburgers bursting out of your kitchen cabinets.
“Once you’ve come up with a memorable, perhaps somewhat humorous, way to attach each item to each part of the room, I bet you anything that 24 hours later, you can walk through your house and you will remember every item you had placed,” Budson said.
When forgetfulness might be a problem
A healthy adult who is struggling to remember the name of a restaurant, for instance, will probably be able to think of it when given a cue or prompt, Ranganath said. In general, we tend to forget names, dates or other details, and that’s normal.
“If you can’t remember the details of a conversation you had an hour ago or the name of the person you met, that would be fairly normal,” he said. “If you can’t remember that the conversation happened or that you met this person, that’s when you might be more concerned.”
Oftentimes, Ranganath said, it’s when a person’s family members or friends take notice of the memory lapses that it may be a medical issue that should be assessed by a health care provider.
Ranganath said he thinks of memory as a precious resource. “If you’re packing for a trip, you don’t take everything that you own; you take the things that you think you’ll need with you,” he said. “Memory is packing the experiences that your brain thinks you’ll need with you into the future.”
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