Have you ever forgotten a lunch date and stood up a good friend? This can be embarrassing and might indicate that your memory isn't as sharp as before. How can we improve our memory? According to Charan Ranganath's book, Why We Remember, there are many strategies.
Taking good care of our physical bodies will improve our brain health generally, and so improve memory, says Ranganath. But we can also use the nature of memory to make certain memories stand out.
Events are more memorable when they are novel. So, if we want to draw on a memory later, we can focus more on unexpected things in an experience. For example, going to a new restaurant with your partner will make the experience more memorable than going to one where you often dine.
When it comes to learning, we can use special tricks. For example, we can use the phrase "King Philip came over for good spaghetti(意大利面)" to remember biological classification: kingdom(界), phylum(门), class(纲), order(目), family(科), genus(属), species(种).
However, memory is not just about recalling. It is subjective and can change over time because our brains reconstruct memories each time we recall them. "Each time we revisit the past in our minds, we bring present information that can invisibly, and even dramatically change our memories," says Ranganath.
Factors like how recently something happened, how much something is repeated, and how we are feeling at the time will change how well we recall a memory. Also, the people around us can affect our memory for an event, by either sharing their own memory or by their expectations of how an event should be remembered. That's why two people witnessing a street fight may see different things occurring, but eventually come to have similar memories about what happened. Their memories influence each other, more so if they talk it through after the fact.
While we can use our memory to remember important lessons from life, we must also be humble. By understanding the way memory works, we can learn to strengthen it for the things we need to know and to avoid some of the pitfalls.
