Barking Up The Wrong Tree April 29th, 2024 ---------------------------------------------------------------
Before we commence with the festivities, I wanted to thank everyone for helping my new book become a bestseller! To check it out, click [here](. --------------------------------------------------------------- New Neuroscience Reveals 4 Secrets That Will Improve Your Memory ([Click here]( to read on the blog) Having a bad memory is like your brain is perpetually stuck in airplane mode -- it's technically functioning but not really connecting to anything useful. At times, our minds feel less like steel traps and more like sieves with personality. Weâve all dealt with forgotten passwords and end up answering security questions that might as well be riddles posed by a bridge troll. Isn't adult life fun? And then thereâs aging: natureâs ultimate bait-and-switch. Sure doesnât make your memory any better. The good news is most of the memory issues we deal with as we age are normal. But it doesnât make memory issues any more fun. So what do we do about it? Well, weâre going to dive into the science to learn about how your memory works, why it doesnât sometimes â and how we can make it better. Weâre gonna get some help from Daniel Schacter. Heâs a professor of psychology at Harvard and his excellent book is â[The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers.]( Weâre only gonna cover 4 of the 7 because those are the big ones (and if I covered all 7 weâd run into attention span issues â and thatâs a topic for another post). Alrighty, letâs get to it... Transience Transience is the weakening or loss of memory over time. Thanks to transience, we can forget embarrassing moments from high school, only to replace them with new embarrassing moments from adulthood. Daniel says with age our memories generally go from âreproductive and specific recollections to reconstructive and more general descriptions.â In peopleâs forties, story recall begins to decline. Word recall gets trickier in our fifties. Itâs usually not huge â generally a 10-15% decline versus younger cohorts. When you reach your sixties and seventies this accelerates, but it varies from person to person. Roughly 20% of people in their seventies still have memories as sharp as college students. Whatâs their secret? Itâs likely due to the effects of education. More schooling builds up what neuroscientists call âcognitive reserve.â Strengthen those brain muscles early on and you have a lot more to spare when aging starts doing its withering work. Research shows cognitive reserve not only prevents the memory decline caused by normal aging but also provides a buffer against dementia. Now it might be a little late to go back and get that Masterâs degree. So what can we do to keep our memories from fading? You want to do more âelaboration during encoding.â Thatâs fancy talk for relating new information to things you already know. This helps to produce less transient memories. When new information has no relationship to old information your brain doesnât know where to file it and it ends up getting lost. By hanging new memories on hooks provided by previous memories you make more natural connections and are more likely to remember things longer. Memory tricks can help. When we convert things we want to remember into vivid or bizarre visual images, theyâre more likely to stick. Images and locations are stored differently than words or ideas and are stickier. This is why you might struggle to remember someoneâs name but you rarely forget how to get to their house. You may have heard about âmemory palaces.â This is a powerful technique where you mentally stroll through an imaginary location, placing memories in specific spots. Problem is, itâs a lot of work and as complex as trying to follow the plot of "Inception" after a few too many glasses of wine. Iâll stick to writing things down on my hand, thanks. But thereâs a lesson here: hard work is the signal your brain responds to when it comes to memory. Just like lifting heavy weights tells muscles, âYou need to growâ, effort tells the brain âThis needs to be remembered.â A less involved method for reducing transience is âretrieval practice.â The more frequently you remember something, the easier it is to remember it again later. This is why smart students use flash cards. Distributing that practice over time increases the power of this technique. And thatâs why cramming for a test rarely results in long term retention. No, I donât expect you to use flash cards for remembering everyday stuff. So whatâs a dead simple way to fight your memoryâs tendency toward transience? Studies show the more we talk and think about things in our everyday life, the better we retain them. So if you want to remember something, discuss it with friends. Read more about it. Even conversing with yourself about stuff you want to retain has been shown to help. And the next memory issue we need to tangle with? Wait -- whereâd I put it? Itâs around here somewhere... Absent-Mindedness This isnât when memories fade with time â itâs when you canât find your keys or forget you had a lunch meeting today. You walk into a room and suddenly your brain pulls a Houdini on you. Youâre left standing in the kitchen, holding a can opener, wondering if you were about to fight a robot or make tuna salad. It's like your brain is playing a never-ending game of hide and seek with your intentions. Your brain laughs at you like Vincent Price in a campy horror movie, followed by maniacal organ music. What causes this? Itâs not transience â itâs because you didnât really encode the information to begin with. You werenât paying attention when you put your keys down, so you never created a memory of where they are. The reason this happens so frequently with keys and eyeglasses is because these are things we do on autopilot. Weâre not thinking and so the information doesnât get stored. Of course, this problem gets worse with age because memory encoding isnât as efficient in our later years. How do we deal with absent-mindedness? The basic recommendation is simple: pay attention. (I used to think I had the attention span of a goldfish, but I think I owe goldfish an apology at this point.) If something is important, get off autopilot and deliberately focus on it. May be easier said than done. In that case, convert memories to physical reminders. You put lunch meetings on your calendar. Always put your keys in the same place. Set alarms. Get things out of your head and into the world. Thereâs a reason Post-It notes are a multi-zillion dollar industry. (My living space looks less like a home and more like the scene of a conspiracy theoristâs last stand.) Alright, next memory issue is⦠Oh, whatâs the name. Itâs on the tip of my tongue. Starts with a âBâ... Blocking Blocking is when the memory is in there but you canât get it out. Itâs like a mental paywall on an article you really want to read. You're standing there, mouth agape, trying to remember that celebrityâs name, and your brain is like a lazy cat that just flicks its tail and stares at you. Suddenly âThat actor from that movie with the thingâ¦â becomes a fun group activity. Depressingly, blocking gets more common with age. Research shows college students have 1-2 âtip of the tongueâ experiences per week while elderly folks have twice that. And middle-aged people score right in between. Studies show itâs the #1 biggest cognitive complaint of people over 50, by far. Blocking keeps life spicy. Who needs the monotony of always knowing what you're talking about? The research here is fascinating. Blocking occurs most often with proper names. They even have a cool name for the underlying issue: âthe Baker/Baker paradox.â If someoneâs name is Baker, youâre more likely to struggle with remembering that than trying to recall that their profession is being a baker. Why? Proper names are arbitrary. The fact that someoneâs name is Baker doesnât connect with anything about them. Itâs random. But remembering that someoneâs profession is a baker calls up a wealth of associations and connections in your mind. (Ooh, fresh bread.) So youâre much more likely to recall that someone works as a baker, but remembering that their name is Baker is a challenge. (Thereâs even an amusing study that showed people were more likely to block on the names Aladdin, Mary Poppins, and Pinocchio than with Grumpy, Snow White, and Scrooge. The latter are all descriptive.) Also, with most words our brains can quickly compensate with synonyms (if you donât remember âbankerâ, you can say âworks in financeâ and nobodyâs the wiser). But with proper names thereâs no substitute â you either remember âChristopher Nolanâ and âMementoâ or you end up saying, âUm, that director-guy who did the movie about not remembering anything.â So what can we do about it? First off, donât give up. Time helps. The majority of blocks resolve within a minute and the more time people spend the more likely they are to recover the memory. Another trick is to go through the alphabet. Research shows when people are blocking on a famous face, having the initial letters to the personâs name is more helpful than contextual information. Okay, time to talk about a very different type of memory issue: what happens when you want to forget â but canât? Persistence There are moments when the issue with memory is not getting it to work but figuring out how to make it stop. Persistence is when you keep recalling things you donât want to. You enter the enormous mental Costco warehouse of regret, guilt, and shame but canât find the exit. Internal monologue becomes infernal monologue. We retain emotional memories better than unemotional ones. It makes sense. If something is dangerous or strange your brain is like, âHmm, better keep this one at the top of the pile.â And itâs why a powerful mnemonic trick is creating bizarre or silly images. But in this context, it really sucks. Persistence is like a sinister gym membership for the brain that you can't cancel, no matter how many times you call, write, or scream into the void. Pushing the ugly memory away doesnât help. Thatâs the âdonât think of a white bearâ issue, first explained by Harvardâs Daniel Wegner. So how do we hit the âmark as readâ button on those distressing memories? Discussing these thoughts can help. May sound ironic given that earlier we saw that talking about memories strengthens them, but here the talking helps dissipate the emotion that keeps them coming back. This is why therapists -- the human equivalent of IT support for emotions â can help. Another trick is writing about them. Writing creates a narrative around the memories that helps you make sense of them. This is extraordinarily powerful. Putting your thoughts on a page means there are fewer of them jangling around inside your head. People who write about their problems report improved mood, higher GPAâs, reduced work absenteeism, and higher rates of reemployment after losing a job. (To learn more about how to best do it, click [here]( Okay, weâve learned a lot. Letâs round it all up and learn about another memory issue â but this one is truly wonderful... Sum Up This is how to improve your memory⦠- Transience: Memories fade, especially as we age. Itâs like being on a game show where the subject is you, and youâre still losing. But if we keep recalling the things we wish to remember, through work or in conversation with loved ones, we can retain more.
- Absent-mindedness: Forgetting where you put your keys (even when they're in your hand). Itâs usually an issue of not sufficiently paying attention in the first place. Turn off autopilot or start using physical reminders.
- Blocking: This is when your brain decides to play keep-away with names and facts. Usually itâs just a matter of waiting, but cycling through the alphabet can help as well.
- Persistence: We all have regrets, worries and memories that have the half-life of uranium. To end the carousel of angst, talk about what bothers you or, even better, write about it.
And if you want to make your memory even better, click [here](. But a lot of people donât want a âbetterâ memory. They dream of having a perfect one. I donât burn a lot of calories fantasizing about that. As I wrote about in one of my [books]( there are a small number of people who, in some areas, do have a perfect memory. And you wouldnât want to be them. People with a cognitive anomaly called âHSAMâ remember everything that happens to them as if it was yesterday â literally. In some ways this is a blessing, but in many other ways a curse. Most deal with depression. There are many things we donât need or want to remember. They also have trouble with romantic relationships. Forgive and forget is a lot harder when the latter is impossible. Their unique condition removes another documented quirk of human memory: positive bias. As time goes by, we better recollect the good things than the bad things. We enhance the past. We gloss over the pain and remember things as better than they really were. This keeps us sane and happy. HSAM robs you of this merciful bias. You donât want a perfect memory. But you can have a âpretty goodâ one. Give the above tips a shot, and your memory will be as reliable as my ability to forget the one item I actually went to the store for. ***If you are one of those lovely people who bought "Plays Well With Others" please leave a review on Amazon [here](. Thanks!*** Email Extras Findings from around the internet... + Want to know a cheap supplement that can keep you sharp when you're sleep deprived? Click [here](. + Want to know a good reason to sleep in on the weekend? Click [here](. + Want to know what kind of jobs increase dementia risk? Click [here](. + Miss my prior post? Here you go: [How To Get Wealthy â Slowly But Surely: 5 Secrets From Research](. + Want to know what reduces anger -- and what doesn't? Click [here](. + You read to the end of the email. Please remember to keep doing that -- and I thank you. Ah, the moment we've all been waiting for -- it's Crackerjack time: picking a good audiobook is hard enough but then you have the issue of who's reading it. A bad narrator can screw up an otherwise great story. So which great books have great voices bringing them to you? Luckily, there's a list of great reads enunciated by movie stars you may already love. Check it out [here](. (Oh, and one more they forgot: Sherlock Holmes stories read by "Sherlock" himself -- [Benedict Cumberbatch](
Thanks for reading!
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