When is it time to start worrying about your memory? Is it when you park your car in an underground garage and then have to find someone from maintenance to help you find it after your meeting?

Or perhaps when you’ve read a book titled, “Remember”, and you refer to the name of the book as, “Forgetting” when you are recommending it to someone?

Yes, I’ve done both.

It seems we are all worried about our memories right now, or lack thereof. I’ve done an unofficial poll, and name recall is at the top of the list, closely followed by running upstairs and completely forgetting the reason why, or opening the fridge and… completely forgetting the reason why.

Then of course there are the classics – you can’t find your keys (or your car for that matter), your glasses or your phone.

What is considered “normal” brain aging, as opposed to something more sinister?

It’s mostly normal!

The good news is that forgetting is completely normal as we age. As amazing as our brains are, they are far from perfect (regardless of our age). They are not designed to remember every name we hear, every plan we make or every day we experience.

In a nutshell, our brains have evolved to remember what is meaningful, and forget what isn’t.

Memory 101

According to Lisa Genova, author of the book, Remember (!), creating a memory takes place in four basic steps – encoding, consolidation, storage and retrieval.

In laymen’s terms:

you have to put the information into your brain
you have to weave the information together
you have to store that woven information via structural and chemical changes in your brain
and then you have to find it when you want to access it

Exhausting! It’s incredible we remember anything given this process.

Command Centre

Our hippocampus is at the centre of this – it’s the memory weaver - necessary for the formation of any new memories that you can later retrieve. So any new information from today that you find interesting, special, surprising, useful or meaningful, will be processed by your hippocampus for consolidation into memory.

Hence if ones hippocampus is damaged, our ability to create new memories will be impaired. Which is why Alzheimer’s is so devastating, as it begins in the hippocampus.

It’s all about connections

Even though the hippocampus is at the centre, it’s not our “memory bank”. In fact, we don’t have one place in our brain where all of our memories reside. Rather, our memory is stored throughout the brain, based on the stimulated neural activity that took place when we first experienced the event.

For example, let’s say you went to an outdoor concert, and someone asked you a week later how the concert was. The details you describe will be the ones activated when the question is asked. Perhaps during one of their most popular songs there was a breeze blowing, the sun was setting and you were transported to an earlier time when you first heard the song. You will be able to recall in vivid detail all these elements because of the strong emotional connections from different parts of your brain, all woven together in a single unit.

Your memory requires the activation of all the various neurons that perceived, paid attention to and processed this experience.

But what’s the most important thing to know?

None of the above will happen if you don’t pay attention.

If we want to remember something, we need to notice what is going on. It’s not enough to experience something – we still have to pay attention to it in order for all the various activated neurons (see concert example above) to be linked.

And in this world of information bombardment, social media, societal pressures and sheer busyness, it’s very easy to not pay attention. Often our mind is so cluttered with thoughts, we are simply “somewhere else”.

Noticing requires two things:

Perception – seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling
Attention

Lisa Genova uses a great example that we’ve all experienced in some form. To get to her office, she drives across the Sagamore Bridge daily, which she describes as a formidable, memorable structure. Of course she sees it (perception) as she both approaches it and drives across it. And yet more than once, after she has crossed it, she has had absolutely no recollection of actually having crossed it.

Or the names of the characters on the Netflix series you are watching every night. You hear the names (perception), but if you don’t pay attention to them, you won’t recall them. Even if you are on Season three!

Without paying attention, you won’t remember what is right in front of you, no matter how obvious and beautiful and impactful it is. Paying attention requires conscious effort. Our brain generally hangs out in “inactive” mode, unless we consciously activate it.

So it’s not necessarily that you forgot the name of the person you were just introduced to, rather, by not actively paying attention, it never made it into your memory in the first place.

But we’re not quite there yet…

There is one more step – yes, paying attention is the critical first step, but that doesn’t quite get the event or name or experience to your hippocampus. Right now it’s hanging out in your prefrontal cortex – and is known as working memory. It’s a memory in the present.

This could be a password, someone’s name, a phone number, or a sunset. And we have about 15 seconds before that “memory” is gone. In order to hold onto it, we need something more to get that information from our prefrontal cortex into our hippocampus.

And that something is emotion, or meaning, or importance… something that is going to take it to the next level.

Let’s say you were just introduced to a gentleman named Robert Townsend, and early in the conversation you realize this person is a great contact for your business. All of a sudden there is importance attached to remembering Robert’s name. Or if he reminds you of an old boyfriend and it conjures up good memories, there is a good chance you will remember his name.

Working memory becomes an actual memory when details in our present moment capture our attention by having special meaning or emotion attached to them.

Don’t beat yourself up!

Don't beat yourself up and don’t compare yourself to others. Some people simply have better memories, and that could be for a whole variety of reasons. But it doesn’t mean you are suffering from any sort of neurological disorder!

The first step is to start paying more attention to the things you want to remember, and to understand how emotion and meaning play an important role. Ultimately, it's life events infused with emotion that we tend to remember in the long term.

Having said all this, of course there are many things you can do to improve your memory… stay tuned.

Thanks for reading and happy summer!

Gillian xx

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No you are not losing your mind!