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Name: Remember
Rating: 4.6 (259 reviews)
Author: Lisa Genova

Lisa Genova

The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting

4.6 (259 ratings)

30 mins

Topics

Neuroscience The Brain

Table of Contents

Remember
Summary of 9 key ideas

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What’s in it for me? Learn all about the strengths and weaknesses of your amazing, fallible memory.

Do you remember where you put your car keys? Or, for that matter, where you parked? How about the name of that actor in that movie – what was his name?

Throughout the day, we experience memory lapses, and if you’re over a certain age, these can hit with a bit of dread. We wonder, is this the beginning of our decline? Is dementia or Alzheimer’s far off?

And yet we think nothing of having memorized tens of thousands of words. We recall specific instants from childhood in vivid color. We remember the lyrics of a pop song from decades past. For all its flaws and inconsistencies, the memory is truly amazing.

Through a survey of the latest research in neuroscience, these blinks explore the power, frailties, and function of the brain’s memory systems.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

how you create, access, and shape memories;
how and why you forget so much; and
how to come to terms with and take advantage of both the strengths and weaknesses of your memory.

Memory is a physical thing triggered by attentiveness and generated through a process of encoding and consolidation.

Anything you perceive evaporates in about 15 to 30 seconds unless you get that information to the hippocampus – a deep brain structure that knits neural activity into long-term memory.

This is how that happens: When you’re fully attentive in a moment of some action, your brain translates raw data from your senses into neural activity within the prefrontal cortex. This process is called encoding. From encoding, we move to consolidation, where the information passes from the prefrontal cortex into the hippocampus. Here, the neural activity is bound into a stable pattern. That pattern of neurons is now your memory of the moment. But what is “memory” and how exactly does it work? Well, there are three main types of memory functions you rely on in your daily life: semantic, episodic, and muscle memory. The memories consolidated by the hippocampus fall into two categories, the semantic and the episodic, so let’s start there.If you have a US penny in your pocket, go ahead, dig it out, hold it in your palm and give it your attention. You’ll see that Lincoln faces right, the phrase In God We Trust arcs overhead, the year sits before his chest, and the word Liberty hangs by his shoulder.

As you look at the coin, this image of the penny is being encoded in the prefrontal cortex of your brain. Remember though that, if you want this memory to stick, it has to be consolidated in your hippocampus. So, study the penny. Pay attention to its details. If you do so repeatedly, the neural representation will eventually travel to the hippocampus of the brain where it’ll be bound into a stable neural pattern, becoming your long-term memory of the penny, ready to be activated on demand.

This sort of memory is what’s called semantic memory. This type of memory comes about through studied repetition or repeated actions in your daily life. The barista at the cafe, for example, knows what the regulars order because she’s heard it day after day.

By contrast, episodic memories are connected to a place and time. They’re the impactful, surprising, and meaningful moments of your life that the brain has translated into stable neural patterns – events, like the first time you held your daughter, or shocking moments, such as a car accident.In the next blink, we’ll take a closer look at these particular types of memory.

Our episodic memory may be powerful and vivid, but it’s probably wrong.

If you’re of a certain age you might remember January 28, 1986, when a space shuttle careened high in the blue sky over Florida and burst into a ball of flames. The explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger left no survivors and was witnessed by millions on live television.

Twenty-four hours later, a pair of psychology professors at Emory University asked their students to jot down an account of what they were doing when they either witnessed or learned of the explosion.Two and a half years later, the professors followed up with the students and again asked for a personal account of that fateful January day. For almost every student, the memory had changed.

Muscle memory is a unique and vital form of memory that you create in your motor cortex through repeated practice.

Whether the penny becomes a semantic memory formed through repetition, or a detail in an episodic memory of a meaningful moment, that memory lives in the hippocampus. However, one extremely important kind of memory – muscle memory – resides somewhere else entirely.

The key message here is: Muscle memory is a unique and vital form of memory that you create in your motor cortex through repeated practice.

Forgetting, though frustrating, is healthy, necessary, and even helpful.

There was a man who couldn’t forget anything . . . ever. His name was Solomon Shereshevsky, and for over three decades, psychologists tested him with long and meaningless lists of words and numbers. Throughout, his memory never faltered.

Rather than a sort of superpower, Shereshevsky came to view his memory as a burden. His mind was full of information, much of it useless, and sorting through it all was a never-ending task. On top of it all, like anyone else, Shereshevsky experienced things he’d rather forget.

Our ability to remember to do something later is thoroughly unreliable.

Classical musicians possess incredible memories. They routinely memorize tens of thousands of notes in sequence, each to be played with its own subtle timing and pressure.

Yo-Yo Ma, the world-renowned cellist, surely ranks high among these memory masters, and yet on one night in the fall of 1999, he forgot his cello – a $2.5 million instrument – in the trunk of a New York City cab.

Your capacity to learn and recall information is both remarkable and shoddy.

At 69 years old, a retired engineer named Akira Haraguchi performed a mind-blowing feat. Without any external reminders, he recited pi – that mysterious mathematical constant – to 111,700 digits.

No, Haraguchi is not a memory savant. He isn’t some kind of mathematical genius. In most ways, his brain is, in fact, just like yours.

The weakening of memory with age is a frustrating but natural phenomenon. But Alzheimer’s Disease? That’s something else entirely.

For many of us, a common lapse in memory looks something like this: You walk into a room, but come to a halt. Looking around, you wonder: Why did I come in here?

Or perhaps you experience the following a few times a day. You’re heading out the front door when suddenly you stop short and slap your pockets. No, not there. Check inside your coat. Where did you leave your keys?

A healthy, engaged lifestyle will not only mitigate Alzheimer’s but can help you resist the normal weakening of your memory.

Over the course of two decades, a team of Alzheimer's researchers followed the lives of 678 elderly catholic nuns. The researchers conducted all manner of physical and cognitive tests, and as each nun died, she left her brain to the team for autopsy.

The researchers discovered, as they would amid any group of older brains, some evidence of amyloid plaque, that trigger of Alzheimer’s. Interestingly, even though they also recognized the shrinkages and tangles that go along with the disease, many of these same nuns showed no signs of the disease in life.

Beyond a healthy lifestyle, you can use methods and tricks to optimize your memory.

If you had to guess, which are you more likely to remember: the number 105799, or Albert Einstein kicking a bagel?

As we’ve learned, memory has a loose grip for abstractions like numbers. But for images and stories memory has a far tighter hold.

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What is Remember about?

Remember (2021) is about our marvelous and flawed ability to create memories. It explores the different sorts of memories we create, how the brain makes them, why they often fail, and what we can do to get the best out of our astonishing and troubled capacity to remember.

Who should read Remember?

People curious about our brain functions
Anyone interested in the human capacity to remember and to forget
Folks concerned about what happens to memory as we get older

About the Author

Lisa Genova is a Harvard-trained neuroscientist and the author of several best-selling novels that deal with the maladies of the human brain, including Still Alice, which was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film starring Julianne Moore.

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