9 tactics to build a stronger mind | Lisa Genova

- People are worried about their memory. If you forgot to show up to your four o'clock meeting or if you forgot the actor who played Tony Soprano in the HBO series 'The Sopranos'. "I don't remember that guy's name, what is it?" Many of us tend to blame ourselves. This distraction is a sign of mental weakness, or memory failure, or lack of character, but 99% of the forgetfulness that happens to all of us is normal. So there are things we can do to be less afraid, have less panic, and have a better relationship with our memory today, because forgetting is a normal part of being human.

My name is Lisa Genova. I am an author and neuroscientist. The name of my book is "Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting." So how do we strengthen our memories? How do we make our memories

stronger

and more time-resistant, so we can remember them decades later? The first essential ingredient to creating a memory that lasts longer than this present moment is attention. If I put my glasses down and don't pay even a moment's attention to notice where I put this, I can't remember where they are because I never formed that memory to begin with.

Your brain will never remember what you don't pay attention to. Chronic stress is really bad for our memory. Stress hormones mobilize the brain and body to respond, fight, flee, react quickly, not think. Stress must be an acute, rapid, intermittent phenomenon. So what happens to your brain and body if you're exposed to chronic, unrelenting stress, and how does that affect your memory? Under chronic stress, your body will continue to release adrenaline and cortisol and will not be able to switch off. This is bad for memory. You're actually shrinking your hippocampus: the part of your brain that's essential for forming conscious memories will be smaller.

You will be inhibiting 'neurogenesis', the birth of new neurons. The very good news about all of this, because it probably scared everyone, is that there are things we can do to combat stress. This is where things like yoga, meditation,

mind

fulness, and exercise come into play. All of these have been shown to restore the size of the hippocampus in people who have been chronically stressed. A quick word about meditation: Many people are intimidated by meditation. They kind of know that this is probably good for them in many ways, but maybe they don't know how to do it.

Here's a nine-second meditation to help you restore your cortisol levels and help save your hippocampus and your ability to remember. Close your eyes if you can. Inhale through your nose for a count of four. Hold for a second and then exhale through your nose for a count of four. And notice how you feel. Here's what's happening: The stress response causes you to breathe like this: By slowly breathing in and out through your nose, you're telling your brain and body that you're safe. We also want to get enough sleep. Sleeping is not a state of doing nothing where you are unconscious and is a waste of time.

You are very busy biologically while you sleep and there are a number of very important things that happen in your brain with respect to memory. For example, if I slept very poorly last night, today I will wake up and my frontal lobe will have a hard time dragging itself to its day job, and one of its most important jobs is to pay attention. And if I can't pay attention to what's happening today, what am I not going to be able to do well today? Form new memories. Additionally, your hippocampus consolidates the information you're learning into a lasting memory that you can consciously recall while you sleep.

So what happens if you don't get enough sleep? Your hippocampus may not have had enough time to do the job, so your memories of what happened yesterday and what you learned yesterday might not be fully formed today, or they might not be formed at all. Caffeine is actually good for memory because it increases attention. So anything that stimulates attention will be a memory booster. We know that sleep is very important for forming memories, so caffeine is good for memory. You just have to be careful that it doesn't compromise your dream. Our brains are not designed to remember people's names.

These are abstract concepts. They live in neurological dead ends. In the end, there is only one way to get into that house that lives at the end of that street, and there is no other way to get there. So can we provide more associations with the person's name to give ourselves a chance? In psychology, this is called the "Baker-Baker paradox." If I'm trying to remember his name and his name is Mr. Baker, it's very difficult for me to remember: abstract concept. But if you asked me to remember the word "baker," I can picture him in an apron, with flour on his face, and, "Oh, I remember the bakery I loved when I was a kid and where we used to eat Danish pastries." there on Sundays." So now I have all these associations in my brain, attached to the word "baker", and it gives me the opportunity to connect with it.

All of these memories benefit from repetition. The more we repeat, the more we practice, The more we rehearse a memory, we strengthen those neural connections, strengthening that neural circuit and making it more likely to be fully recalled. One of the ways we can replay a memory is by writing it down. a diary, what I have decided to write will become a

stronger

and more reinforced memory in my brain. I will also have the opportunity to revisit that memory by reading it later. Many people come up to me worried and say: "If I don't write what I have. what to do later, I'll forget to do it.

That means I'm getting Alzheimer's." And I tell everyone, "No, it's your prospective memory. It's awful. It's not cheating to write it. It's actually good practice." Airline pilots don't trust their brain or potential memories to remember to lower the wheels before landing the plane. They outsource the work to a to-do list, a checklist. We should all write it down, put it on our phones, put it on our calendar alerts, make to-do lists. If you want to remember to buy milk at the supermarket, write it down. Another way to better remember this information has to do with self-diagnosis.

I'm trying to consolidate something in memory and I'm just putting the information in, I'm traveling in one direction through the neurons. If I then try to remember the information, I'm now going through those circuits in both. Directions will help reinforce and strengthen that memory. Granted, having a word stuck on the tip of your tongue is a normal problem in memory retrieval. It's just a byproduct of how our brains are organized. So, searching for a word, Googling a word that's on the tip of your tongue is not cheating. It will not cause digital amnesia. It will not weaken your memory in any way.

It frees you. We can Google anything we can't remember at any time and then use that information to keep thinking, continue the conversation, and learn more. You have my permission to Google it and look it up. What I would love for you to take away from all of this is that your memory is amazing. It is limitless in what it is capable of remembering if it is given the right kind of information, if it is given the right kind of tools and associations. And it's wildly imperfect, and that's just the price of having a human brain.

Forgetting is a normal part of being human.