Time - The Science of Memory - 2019 PDF

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SPECIAL EDITION
THE SCIENCE
OF MEMORY
T he Stor y of Our Lives
Memories are often compared to

simple snapshots, but memory
itself is complicated, and
researchers don’t fully know
how it works physiologically.
CONTENTS
4 Introduction: Why We Remember
Chapter 1: Making Memories

8 The Biology of Memory
14 Understanding the Limbic System
16 The Time-Bending Magic of Smell
22 An Elephant Never Forgets
26 The Essential Act of Being Human
30 The Ups and Downs of a Perfect Memory
Chapter 2: Why We Forget

36 Forgetting Childhood
42 A Life Lost to Amnesia
50 Memorable Movies
52 Aging, Memory and Myths
56 8 Unexpected Things That
Mess with Your Memory
Chapter 3: Memory Now

62 The Digital-Era Brain
66 Battle of the Big Brains
72 Why Sleeping on It Is Key for Memory
76 Out of Mind
Chapter 4: Building a Better Memory

84 Train Your Brain
94 6 Funny Things You Can Do
to Remember
Parts of this edition appeared previously in TIME and Health.
3
Early humans had to

remember where predators hid.
Illustration from L’Homme
Primitif by Louis Figuier.
INTRODUCTION
WHY WE
REMEMBER
From an evolutionary point of view, it comes down to
survival of the fittest. He who endures remembers where the
food is and where the predators lurk
By Eileen Daspin
4
OR AN EXPERIMENT ON NAVIGATIONAL 300 million hours of television programming. The

skills and natural selection, the set- catch is that memories are as faulty as they are es-
ting—a Santa Barbara, Calif., farmers sential. No two people remember the same event
market on a Saturday morning—could the same way, a fact famously illustrated in the Jap-
not have been more Darwinian. So was anese crime drama Rashomon, in which four peo-
the question at hand: How would spatial mem- ple each remembered killing the same samurai—
ory and adaptive behavior play out for a modern including the samurai himself, who returned from
hunter-gatherer? the dead to testify that he had committed hara-kiri.
To find out, a group of psychology professors Memory is so crucial, we even forget to remem-
posted themselves at the market’s entrance and ber, with the brain pushing out less-important mem-
enlisted shoppers as foragers. Eighty-six subjects ories to make room for the more-important ones.
were led along intentionally circuitous routes to This is a phenomenon that Friedrich Nietzsche
pre-selected food stalls. There, they tasted the farm- called “active forgetfulness,” by his lights, an impor-
ers’ goods, were guided to the center of the market tant component of happiness. The German philoso-
and finally were given a special device to indicate pher’s argument wasn’t that you should be pleased
the locations of the foods they had sampled. True you forgot where you parked your car, but rather
to Paleolithic form, the shop- that not remembering paves
pers easily identified the loca- the way for peace of mind. “To
tions that provided goods with shut the doors and windows of
the most energy—olive oil, av- Our memories consciousness for a while . . .”
ocados and nuts—but strug- are amazing, Nietzsche wrote in On the Ge-
gled to place booths stocking nealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo,
calorie-light leafy greens. able to store allows for “a little tabula rasa of
“I was surprised at how long-term some consciousness to make room for
cleanly the results came out,” 2.5 petabytes of something new . . . like a door-
says psychology professor keeper or guardian of mental
Joshua New, one of the design- data—about 300 order, rest and etiquette.”
ers of the study, who now teaches million hours Research suggests that mem-
at Columbia University. “People ory literally starts in utero. When
hadn’t thought about encoding
of television Dutch professors put a honk-
landmarks like that. But if you programming. ing, vibrating device on the ab-
eat at a subpar restaurant, you’re domens of women in their 30th
not going to commit memory to to 38th weeks of pregnancy, they
learning how to get back there.” found that the fetuses quickly recalled the noise,
From an evolutionary point of view, the reason so that when the device was sounded 10 minutes
we remember, like pretty much all human activity, later, they didn’t squirm and their heartbeats re-
comes down to survival of the fittest. He who is going mained stable. The 34-week-olds even remembered
to make it out alive remembers where the food is. the noise four weeks later. “It’s like getting used to
And what the bad guys look like. And the best place a New York train station,” lead author J.G. Nijhuis
to hide from predators. What scientists call adap- told Scientific American. “It is a learning capability
tive memory—which is always functioning to figure to distinguish safe from unsafe stimuli. It is a primi-
out new solutions to problems—is key to nearly ev- tive form of memory.”
erything we do. We have to remember to physically Then it gets a little more complicated. Infants
navigate the world, to reproduce, to interact with and toddlers remember, but by about age 7, the first
others, to recognize kin, to know the truth of a situ- three years of memories are almost entirely erased
ation. Memory is what allows us to learn, to acquire, from the conscious memory and overlaid with new
to store and retrieve information. ones. From there, our memories shift and evolve,
As machines, our memories are amazing, able colored constantly by our experiences. Why do we
to store long-term some 2.5 petabytes of data, by remember? As Oscar Wilde once suggested, to fill
one professor’s calculation. That’s the equivalent of in “the diary we all carry about with us.” □
5
6
Making
Memories
It is the mechanism for encoding,
sorting, storing and retrieving
information. But memory also defines
our essential selves.
Scientists believe groups of

neurons in different parts
of the brain are encoded to
activate a memory.
THE BIOLOGY
OF MEMORY
Our capacity to remember does
not exist in a discrete niche of
the brain but rather involves several
areas working together to make
sense of our experiences
By Richard Jerome
I
T WAS AN UNLIKELY VENUE FOR AMER-
icans to receive a lesson in neuro-
science. During the 2018 Senate hear-
ings into sexual-assault allegations
against Supreme Court nominee Brett
Kavanaugh, accuser Christine Blasey
Ford delved into the workings of the
human brain to explain why she could vividly recall
the alleged attack, decades earlier, but not specif-
ics, like the date of the party.
At work were the levels of norepinephrine and
epinephrine in the brain, said Ford, a professor of
psychology. When activated, those hormones, key
to the fight-or-flight reflex, encode memories into
the hippocampus, a memory center in the brain.
Among other things, the norepinephrine and epi-
nephrine serve to lock in “the trauma-related expe-
rience,” explained Ford, “whereas other details kind
of drift.” Cable-news commentators rushed to de-
fine the hippocampus for their audiences, but rec-
onciling the gulf between Ford’s recollections and
Kavanaugh’s proved, as we know, impossible.
That could have been predicted. The science
of memory has intrigued and baffled researchers
for decades. In the broadest sense, memory is the
mechanism for receiving information and then en-
coding, sorting, storing and retrieving it. The act of
9
SCIENCE OF MEMORY THE BIOLOGY OF MEMORY
Researchers at the University of Oxford

study postmortem brain samples.
remembering is absolutely essential to our survival. places and objects; it includes two subcategories:
We could not carry out the basic functions of living episodic memory, which logs one’s personal expe-
unassisted without our powers of recall. Learning riences—say, the coffee date you had last week or
would be impossible; nothing in the world would your first kiss; and semantic memory, which stores
have context. We would have no sense of self—in- factual information. The second major class of re-
deed, we wouldn’t know what we’d done five sec- call is implicit memory, which encompasses un-
onds ago. Only within the past 50 years or so have conscious, procedural or motor tasks: walking,
researchers begun to understand the neurological tying your shoe—things we do routinely, without
and physiological operations that make this enig- conscious thought. Implicit memory calls on other
matic but indispensable faculty possible. What’s brain systems, such as the cerebellum (which regu-
clear is that the human memory doesn’t reside in lates muscle activity) and the striatum (a cluster of
one corner of the brain that scarfs up stimuli and re- neurons that regulate voluntary movement).
cords them for later retrieval. Rather, it’s a complex When a memory forms, the first, crucial step is
system, involving several areas of the brain, work- encoding. For example, when meeting a person for
ing to make sense of life’s experiences. And a great the first time, our various senses take in their looks,
deal about it remains to be understood. the sound of their voice, the smell of their breath or
Neurobiologists have identified two main classes body, the feel of their handshake. All that sensory
of long-term memory at work in the brain. Explicit input gets stored and analyzed in the hippocampus.
(or declarative) memory, which is processed in the The information gets evaluated—graded, in a way,
hippocampus and medial temporal lobe, is con- to determine whether it’s worth retaining as part of
scious recollection for names, dates, events, people, your long-term memory. In a process known as con-
10
solidation—a window of a few hours that is enhanced understanding of memory, which was essentially
by sleeping—memories deemed worthy of retention a black box until the mid-20th century. A huge
are stabilized, and then associated neurons are trans- breakthrough came in 1957 when McGill Univer-
ferred to the neocortex, the wrinkly sheet of neural sity neuropsychologist Brenda Milner published a
tissue that forms the outside surface of the brain. landmark paper based on the case study of Henry
Another key cog in the brain’s memory-retention Molaison, a former assembly-line worker from Con-
complex is the amygdala, an almond-shaped struc- necticut. Molaison had undergone brain surgery to
ture in the temporal lobe that imbues recollections relieve severe epileptic seizures—specifically, doc-
with emotional significance, associating them with tors had removed a portion of his medial tempo-
shame, joy, love, grief or fear. Emotionally charged ral lobes from both sides of his brain. On one level,
events are generally much harder to forget—they’re the operation was a success—the seizures subsided.
sometimes referred to as “flashbulb memories” be- But in another sense, Molaison’s life, which lasted
cause they stand out so vividly. another half-century, was altered disastrously: his
We know the brain’s major memory centers, but surgery had left him with anterograde amnesia, an
what goes on there, exactly? How are memories en- inability to form new memories.
coded and stored? Through a complicated inter- Molaison’s surgeon consulted Milner and her
play of electricity and chemicals. colleagues at the Montreal Neu-
Nerve cells—or neurons—con- rological Institute, who made a
nect with other cells at a gap detailed study of the case. What
known as a synapse. That’s Surgery on they determined was that the op-
where electrical pulses fire up, eration had cut out much of the
triggering the exchange of mes-
a man who patient’s hippocampus—the
sengers called neurotransmit- suffered epileptic first evidence to suggest that the
ters. When we recall a memory, seizures left him brain structure was critical to the
the same neurons from the orig- formation of memories. On the
inal experience are reactivated
unable to form other hand, tests showed that
and duplicate the moment. new memories Molaison’s implicit memory was
To give an idea of the scope but revealed that undimmed. For instance, he was
of these operations, your typical shown how to draw the image of
human brain has about 100 bil- brain structure a star by tracing its reflection in a
lion neurons, passing signals was key to recall. mirror. Molaison could perform
to one another via well over that task repeatedly but had no
100 trillion synapses. As one memory whatsoever of being
brain cell sends signals to an- taught how to do it. The result
other, it strengthens the synapse between them— demonstrated that there are at least two separate
a process known as potentiation—creating a bond areas of the brain involved with memory process-
that grows more powerful as the signals multiply. ing—the hippocampus and medial temporal lobe
When we study a textbook in school, for example, deal with explicit memories, and a different part of
drumming it into our heads by marking key pas- the brain (later discovered to be the basal ganglia
sages in highlighter, it stokes potentiation. And so, and cerebellum) handles implicit, automatic tasks.
with each new experience, or repetition of a previ-
ous one, the brain rewires itself—a phenomenon WHILE RESEARCHERS WERE identifying the
scientists call neuroplasticity. Indeed, some areas “where” of memory in the brain, the question of
of the brain can actually grow with repeated use. “how” remained mysterious—and still does, to a
In a study of London cabbies, for instance, mag- significant extent. Around the time Milner was pub-
netic imaging tests showed that the drivers’ hippo- lishing her findings, the neuroscientist Eric Kandel,
campi—which are heavily involved in spatial mem- now at Columbia University, began a decades-long
ory—became larger the longer they were on the job, quest to understand the biochemical mechanisms
navigating the city’s streets. of memory storage, work that would earn him a
These are the broad outlines of neuroscientists’ Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2000.
11
SCIENCE OF MEMORY THE BIOLOGY OF MEMORY
Kandel has probed the molecular underpinnings of spurring synaptic connections. Meanwhile, other re-
short-term and long-term memory, including ge- searchers had learned more about the alphabet soup
netic changes that take place and help build new that powers memory. For instance, two receptors,
connections in the brain. He started out by picking AMPA and NMDA, also play crucial roles inside the
up on Milner’s work and studying the human hip- hippocampus, enabling learning and the synapse po-
pocampus—how memories might be processed and tentiation needed for long-term information storage.
stored there. But Kandel and his partner, W. Alden Then in the early 2000s, Kandel and a member
Spencer, found that analyzing such a complex struc- of his lab, Kausik Si, made what was considered a
ture in such a complex animal wasn’t conducive to remarkable discovery: that another protein, CPEB,
determining memory’s basic essentials. may be responsible for creating stable long-term
“In the 1960s, we went to a more reductionist ap- memories. The surprise was that CPEB resembled
proach,” Kandel told the New York Times in 2012. a prion—which in its usual form is a toxic, self-
“Instead of studying complicated mammalian brain perpetuating protein that may play a role in mad
cells, we studied the neural system of a simple an- cow disease and Alzheimer’s. CPEB, however, ap-
imal, Aplysia, a snail with a very large nerve cell.” peared to be a mutation that helps stabilize mem-
Kandel subjected the foot-long mollusks to reflex ories for the long term. Although other nonpatho-
tests, stimulating their nerve cells genic prion-like proteins have
with electrodes to gauge the re- been discovered in recent years,
sponse. “We discovered that the at that time, the idea that any-
snail’s reflexes could be modified In studying thing like a prion, one of the most
by several forms of learning, and malevolent actors in the body,
that learning involved alterations
the conversion could do something beneficial
in how nerve cells communicated of short-term was “nothing less than extraor-
with one another.” memories into dinary,” Rockefeller University’s
Kandel then studied the con- Robert Darnell wrote when Kan-
version of short-term memories long-term ones, del and Si published their work.
into long-term ones—essentially Kandel found When activated by a clue—say,
the act of learning—and found that learning a snippet of a song—our brains
that learning itself strengthened can retrieve a memory within a
the brain. To illustrate: Short- strengthened millisecond, but precisely how
term memory can hold about the brain. isn’t known. Although imag-
seven digits for about 20 or 30 ing techniques show that the re-
seconds. The common exam- trieval network involves inter-
ple given is a 10-digit telephone connected areas of the medial
number you don’t have a chance to jot down; you temporal lobe, the specifics remain to be seen. An-
try to keep it in your head just long enough to dial. other of many other open areas of memory research
What Kandel discovered was that when you actu- is the role of the amygdala and emotion in making
ally learned the number, the synaptic connections some emotionally charged memories more vivid;
involved strengthened. “It was astonishing!” Kan- or, as some studies suggest, whether a strong emo-
del recalled. “You could double the number of syn- tion such as fear can actually have the opposite ef-
aptic connections in a very simple neurocircuit as a fect, altering or clouding memories we believe to
result of experience and learning.” be sharp and accurate.
Kandel and colleagues found that, unlike short- As scientists follow these and other complicated
term memory, long-term memory requires the syn- threads of human memory, they are unraveling the
thesis of new proteins. In the early 1970s, they found tapestry of life itself. In Kandel’s book In Search of
evidence to suggest that the neurotransmitter se- Memory, he quotes Tennessee Williams’s play The
rotonin activates a messenger molecule crucial to Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore: “Has it ever
memory known as cyclic AMP (cAMP). During the struck you . . . that life is all memory, except for the
1990s Kandel’s lab identified the protein CREB as one present moment that goes by you so quickly
playing a key role in long-term memory storage by you hardly catch it going? It’s really all memory.” □
12
1. Procedural memory
The memory of motor
skills allows us to
complete tasks we have
previously learned and
know how to do without
trying, such as typing or
riding a bike.
2. Priming
In this process, exposure
to a stimulus triggers
associated concepts that
help us recall an answer.
Our brains are continu-
ously forming associa-
tions between memories
and ideas, such as the
Know Your Terms: color yellow, a banana

and a monkey. You’re
A Memory Glossary faster and more likely to

come up with the word
“banana” after reading
BY EMILY JOSHU the word “yellow.”
as knowing that 2+3=5,
Sorting out the different types of memories can be that George Washington 3. Conditioning
confusing, but they all essentially fall into one of two was the first president or Unconscious memory
categories: either declarative or implicit. Within those what the capital of your makes associations
classifications, memories are deemed either short- home state is. between two stimuli in
term or long-term. Short-term memories last only up to this process. The clas-
about 30 seconds, while long-term memories can theo- IMPLICIT MEMORY sic example is Russian
retically last forever, but they aren’t all created equal. Also known as non- physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s
declarative memory, conditioning experiments
DECLARATIVE include calculating a tip, this long-term memory with dogs. Before show-
MEMORY listening to a newscast system unconsciously ing a canine a bowl of
Also known as explicit or remembering lecture influences our current food, Pavlov rang a bell.
memory. This is a sys- material for a test. Stor- perceptions and behavior Eventually, the animal
tem of conscious memo- age capacity is between without effort or aware- salivated at the sound
ries requiring effort, four and seven items at ness. There are three of a bell, knowing it was
such as being able to a time. These could be subsets: time to eat.
tick off all the items on four chunks of informa-
a grocery list, recalling tion, five words, six let-
material you’ve read ters or seven numbers.
in a book or article, or
remembering a friend’s 2. Episodic memory
face or a phone number. A type of long-term mem-
There are three subsets: ory for recalling past
events, such as a road
1. Working memory trip with a friend, a family
A short-term system for reunion or an episode of
storing and processing a TV show you watched
limited amounts of the other night.
information for 15 to 30
seconds; after that, the 3. Semantic memory
memory begins to decay. A type of long-term
Tasks that function memory for recalling
under working memory general knowledge, such
13
UNDERSTANDING lays down new tracks—forming and

retrieving memories—while the
THE LIMBIC
prefrontal cortex switches between
tracks, gathering related memories
to form context for an experience.
SYSTEM The resulting memory is brief,

staying in the back of your mind like
a sticky note with a password on it.
Memories and emotions are linked through 4 / OLFACTORY BULB

important brain structures The olfactory bulb is composed
By Emily Joshu of receptors that send signals to
the hippocampus. The receptors
hang off a thin membrane,
Memory is often described with evocative, romantic terms, as almost resembling a toothbrush
sepia-tinted snapshots or as a scrapbook. But this vital function is grazing the nasal passage. This
not something you can tuck under your arm like a diary. Instead, it is the primary limbic structure for
comes to life inside the limbic system, an umbrella of brain structures processing smell. When you walk
controlling emotions, drives and learning processes. How do we into a room and detect something
remember where we left our keys, how to hit a baseball, or when to eat familiar, like your grandfather’s
or sleep? Here is a look at some key areas and what each does. cologne, that smell projects from
the olfactory receptors into the
controls emotional processing, hippocampus and amygdala.
1 / HIPPOCAMPUS memory and responses. It works There are few memories that have
in tandem with the hippocampus smells strongly bound to them,
The hippocampus is a seahorse- to connect memories with so odor-related cues are powerful
shaped structure, embedded emotions such as fear. The compared to visual or auditory
in the temporal lobe. This is amygdala activates when we’re cues, says Wagner. “We’re not a
where all conscious memories afraid of something, but the very olfactory organism. We’re
begin and where long-term connection between the amygdala very much a visual and auditory
memories are processed. and the prefrontal cortex also sort of species,” he adds. Smell
According to Anthony Wagner, helps to mediate the alarm by is atypical, so it’s easier to recall
director of the Memory Lab at providing reasoning and context to odor-related memories.
Stanford University, the parts control it or work through it. When
of the brain that process the this connection is damaged, it is
senses—taste, smell, sight, more difficult to overcome fear or 5 / HYPOTHALAMUS
sound, touch—communicate resolve disturbing recollections,
with the hippocampus. “The a condition often seen in How is it that you know it is time
hippocampus is positioned at post-traumatic stress disorder to feed yourself, sleep or drink?
the top of this information flow patients. Thank your hypothalamus, which
in the brain,” he says. What we controls involuntary functions
remember about an event, in like hunger, body temperature,
effect, comes from a competition 3 / PREFRONTAL CORTEX fear, sexual responses and
between typical memory traces. hormonal balances that keep us
So when we touch something In the frontal lobe, the prefrontal alive. However, sometimes the
or see someone’s face, the cortex is responsible for working hypothalamus malfunctions and
hippocampus helps us associate memory, the ability to remember your body forgets to tell you when
the sense with a memory. and use information for reasoning to stop doing these things. People
and activities during a specific with Prader-Willi syndrome are
moment in time. These could examples of this, their hunger
2 / AMYGDALA include doing your taxes, baking insatiable because their bodies
a cake or even writing this article. never remember to feel full. Even
An almond-shaped structure of The interaction between it and the though these are not functions that
gray matter, the amygdala, nestled hippocampus can be compared we actively think about, they still
close to the hippocampus, to a railroad: the hippocampus are a part of memory.
14
HIPPOCAMPUS
1
PREFRONTAL CORTEX
3
4
OLFACTORY
BULB
5
HYPOTHALAMUS
2
AMYGDALA
15
The 20th-century British

homeopath Dr. Edward Bach
prescribed honeysuckle to
remedy nostalgia and longing
for the past.
THE TIME-
BENDING
MAGIC OF
SMELL
Odor-evoked autobiographical memories
derive their power from the way they are
processed in the brain
By Richard Jerome
N THE SHADOW OF THE GRAND APART-

ment houses along Central Park West, an
aroma of honeysuckle wafts through the
thick summer air and suddenly I’m a boy
again in our New Jersey backyard, where
a cluster of white petals surrounds the
grave of our fox terrier, who died when I
was 10. A garlic breeze from a local restaurant car-
ries me miles and years away to Boston’s North End,
dining with my wife-to-be at an Italian place where
the owners lived in back and they served up the best
chicken parm ever; a cinnamon stick conjures the
late, lamented Café Figaro in the Village, where
I’ve grabbed a window table overlooking Bleecker
Street, watching till she rounds the corner from
dance class and we sip cappuccinos into the night.
We’ve all had the experience, a scent that evokes
vivid, visceral memories, as if an internal time ma-
chine were transporting us back to events and places
in our deepest past, recalling them to life with pro-
found urgency and immediacy. It’s a phenomenon
17
SCIENCE OF MEMORY THE INFLUENCE OF SMELL
that inspired one of the most celebrated passages neighborhood fire sparked intense feelings of guilt
in Western literature, the scene early in Marcel and nausea. As it turned out, the man had served in
Proust’s seven-volume masterpiece, In Search of Vietnam and witnessed a vehicle accident in which
Lost Time [see excerpt on page 23], when the nar- fellow soldiers had died in a burst of flames.
rator bites into a madeleine biscuit dipped in Lin- “Odor-evoked autobiographical memories,” as
den tea and the taste and aroma unleash a sudden scientists refer to them, derive their special power
flood of reminiscence that carries him back to early from the particular way they’re processed in the
childhood. He remembers the aunt who used to fix brain. The olfactory system is the only sensory
him madeleines the same way; the old, gray house apparatus that does not feed its incoming signals
where she roomed; flowers in the garden and water through the thalamus—one of the brain’s major
lilies on the river Vivonne; the parish church, mod- relay stations. Rather, scents and tastes are directly
est homes and people of Combray, the fictional vil- connected to the limbic system, a collection of brain
lage where the narrator grew up. Proust’s observa- structures important for emotion, behavior, moti-
tions were so compelling, they inspired a cottage vation and memory. Specifically, when you smell
industry of psychological research into what is re- something, the odor gets routed through the olfac-
ferred to as the Proust phenomenon—the ability of tory bulb, a neural structure that analyzes scent.
odors to cue vivid autobiograph- Beginning inside the nose
ical memories. and running along the bottom
Why do scents work such of the brain, the olfactory bulb
time-bending magic, peeling Scent memories is closely connected with two
away decades instantaneously other limbic-system sites—the
as no other human sense can?
pack a more hippocampus, the seahorse-
The sight of fall foliage, the potent emotional shaped part of the forebrain re-
sound of a train whistle, the feel wallop than sponsible for the functions of
of Silly Putty—all, to varying de- memory and learning as well
grees, can spark remembrance
recollections as the perception of space and
of things past. But it seems that triggered by time; and the amygdalae, two
only our noses allow us to relive sights, sounds small masses of gray matter, re-
events, however remote or or- sembling almonds, that, among
dinary, in the moment. These and other other things, are involved in the
recollections do indeed hold sensory cues. experience of emotions. It’s this
a unique place in our psyches, unique proximity and access to
writes cognitive neuroscientist the limbic system that underlies
Rachel Herz, an expert on the the particularly evocative ability
psychology of smell. They extend deeper into our of odors to generate memory and emotion. While
past “specifically clustered in the first decade,” Herz the human body has just two receptors for sight and
notes, and also pack a more potent emotional wal- four for touch, it has about 350 for scent, allowing
lop than recollections triggered by sights, sounds it to detect a trillion different smells.
and other sensory cues. All in all, then, smell is a formidable capacity,
On the flip side, potent odors can revive inci- albeit one we tend to underestimate. “Humans are
dents we’d rather forget, in the worst cases inducing visual creatures—our external environment is pre-
severe distress and even all-too-vivid flashbacks, dominantly represented by brilliant and colorful
particularly in people who already suffer from post- scenes acquired through our eyes,” says Afif Aqra-
traumatic stress disorder. For instance, the smell bawi, a researcher in neuroscience and biology at
of alcohol on a man’s breath or a particular after- the University of Toronto who specializes in the
shave might cause the survivor of a sexual assault link between scent and memory. “This makes it
to relive the horrific experience. A widely cited se- difficult for us to appreciate the importance of our
ries of case studies published in 2003 by PTSD re- other senses. Nevertheless, the majority of the ani-
searchers Eric Vermetten and J. Douglas Bremner mal kingdom must rely on the sense of smell to nav-
found in one patient that the scent of diesel from a igate their surroundings. Olfaction is essential for
18
Researchers at the European Centre for Taste Sciences

examine a newborn to see if it remembers strong tastes such
as anise and curry that were part of the mother’s diet.
most organisms to find food, predators and mates.” the roots of that olfactory deficit may hold a key to
Indeed, adds Aqrabawi, “chemosensation”—the ca- treating those afflictions.
pacity to sense chemical substances, an evolution- There are also possible psychic benefits. In one
ary precursor to olfaction—“serves as the primary promising study, neuroscientist Artin Arshamian
means of external experience and communication of the Donders Institute in the Netherlands found
for even the most elementary forms of life, such as in a survey of young adults that autobiographi-
bacteria and protozoans.” cal memories cued by odors tended to be not only
A growing insight into the scent-memory con- more intense but also more positive than recollec-
nection has great potential for enhancing human tions cued by verbal labels for the same odors. A
health, opening the door for new therapies and 2013 study led by Japanese researcher Masahiro
cures. For example, a large body of work has shown Matsunaga found that when men and women were
that one of the first signs of Alzheimer’s and Parkin- exposed to a particular perfume they associated
son’s is that patients suddenly find themselves un- with a pleasant memory, the fragrance gave them
able to identify odors or pinpoint when and where an elevated sense of comfort and happiness and a
they smelled them. Researchers believe that finding decrease in anxiety.
19
SCIENCE OF MEMORY THE INFLUENCE OF SMELL
EXCERPT
The Power of a Madeleine

In one of literature’s most famous passages linking smell, taste
and memory, Marcel Proust’s hero bites into a cookie and is transported
to his childhood in Combray, France
No sooner had the warm liquid, little crumb of madeleine which

and the crumbs with it, touched on Sunday mornings at Combray
my palate than a shudder ran (because on those mornings I did
through my whole body, and I not go out before church-time),
stopped, intent upon the extraor- when I went to say good day to her
dinary changes that were taking in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie
place. An exquisite pleasure used to give me, dipping it first
had invaded my senses, but indi- in her own cup of real or of lime-
vidual, detached, with no sug- flower tea. The sight of the little
gestion of its origin. . . . Whence madeleine had recalled nothing
could it have come to me, this to my mind before I tasted it; per-
all-powerful joy? I was conscious haps because of those memories,
that it was connected with the so long abandoned and put out
taste of tea and cake, but that of mind, nothing now survived,
it infinitely transcended those everything was scattered; the
savours, could not, indeed, be forms of things, including that of
of the same nature as theirs. the little scallop-shell of pastry,
Whence did it come? What did it so richly sensual under its severe,
signify? How could I seize upon The madeleine story appears in religious folds, were either
and define it? Swann’s Way, the first volume of obliterated or had been so long
And I begin again to ask Remembrance of Things Past, dormant as to have lost the power
myself what it could have been, published in 1913. of expansion which would have
this unremembered state which allowed them to resume their
brought with it no logical proof I decide to attempt to make it place in my consciousness.
of its existence, but only the reappear. I retrace my thoughts to And once I had recognized the
sense that it was a happy, that it the moment at which I drank the taste of the crumb of madeleine
was a real state in whose pres- first spoonful of tea. soaked in her decoction of lime-
ence other states of conscious- And suddenly the memory flowers which my aunt used to
ness melted and vanished. returns. The taste was that of the give me immediately the old grey
With this in mind, Herz suggests that the evoca- of thoughtful reminiscence “increases positive af-
tive power of odor could make it a valuable clini- fect, bolsters self-esteem, strengthens the connec-
cal tool. “Many people intuitively note that odors tion between one’s past and present, produces feel-
have the potential to elicit comfort,” writes Herz in ings of social connectedness, elevates optimism and
the journal Brain Sciences, such as when a person infuses life with meaning.”
“sniffs a garment worn by a loved one they are sep- Who can argue with that? Interestingly, the Mat-
arated from.” She adds that “nostalgia—reflecting sunaga study determined that whereas one usually
upon one’s personal past—has been shown to have associates nostalgic feelings with music—the tune
many beneficial psychological consequences.” Sub- that takes you back to childhood, your first love or
stantial research has demonstrated that this kind whatever you consider the good old days—odors
20
When odors trigger strong

autobiographical memories,
scientists call it the Proust effect.
Here, the novelist circa 1900.
house upon the street, where

her room was, rose up like the
scenery of a theatre to attach
itself to the little pavilion, open-
ing on to the garden, which had
been built out behind it for my
parents; and with the house the
town, from morning to night and
in all weathers, the Square where
I was sent before luncheon, the
streets along which I used to run
errands, the country roads we
took when it was fine. And just as
the Japanese amuse themselves
by filling a porcelain bowl with
water and steeping in it little
crumbs of paper which until then
are without character or form, but,
the moment they become wet,
stretch themselves and bend,
take on colour and distinctive
shape, become flowers or houses
or people, so in that moment all
the flowers in our garden and in
M. Swann’s park, and the water-
lilies on the Vivonne and the good
folk of the village and their little
dwellings and the parish church
and the whole of Combray and
of its surroundings, taking their
proper shapes and growing solid,
sprang into being, town and gar-
dens alike, from my cup of tea.
actually inspired more than twice as many happy cation: to feel better, happier, more exhilarated,
reveries as did musical excerpts. The effects are it may literally be as simple as stopping to smell
physiological as well. When a smell triggers an the roses—or the pine or freshly cut grass or what-
exhilarating or exciting memory, it can make the ever scent evokes your satisfying autobiographi-
heart race and spark a rush of adrenaline. Another cal memories.
research survey found that when men and women For me, it’s a certain perfume that transforms me
from ages 29 to 50 self-selected a scent that elic- once again into a toddler playing with the vintage
ited a pleasant, soothing autobiographical mem- atomizer on Mother’s vanity. She’s gone more than
ory—say, a particular flower—their breathing grew 30 years now, but that scent brings Mom back, if
slower and more relaxed. The remarkable impli- only for a fleeting, fragrant moment. □
21
AN ELEPHANT NEVE
Averaging about 10 1⁄2 pounds,
the pachyderm brain is the
largest among all land animals,
with a memory that rivals those
of apes and dolphins
By Courtney Mifsud
S
HIRLEY AND JENNY HAD NOT
laid eyes on each other for more
than two decades, but when the
old friends were brought to-
gether for a surprise reunion in
Hohenwald, Tenn., the moment
was beyond dramatic. It was
earsplitting. First Shirley started bellowing, then
Jenny. Carol, who witnessed the moment, described
the sounds as “roars.”
No, Jenny and Shirley weren’t long-lost girl-
friends. They were retired circus elephants who had
worked together briefly, been separated and suffered
abuse. Now, they were side by side again at an animal
sanctuary and overjoyed. “They were trying to climb
in with each other and frantically touching through
the bars,” wrote Carol (Buckley), founder of the ref-
uge, at the time. “I have never experienced anything
even close to this depth of emotion,” she said.
It turns out that what they say about elephants is
true. Not only do they have better long-term mem-
ories than their four-footed peers, an elephant’s
brain—at 101⁄2 pounds of matter—is the largest
among all the land animals. Some elephants re-
member injuries and hold grudges against who-
ever hurts them. They recognize their reflections in
a mirror, suggesting self-awareness, and some even
know their handlers by sight after being separated
for years. In terms of sheer intelligence, pachyderms
22
R FORGETS
Elephants understand
basic math and can keep
track of relative sums.
SCIENCE OF MEMORY ANIMALS AND MEMORY
Bottlenose dolphins have procedural

memories that last for years.
are up there with dolphins, apes and people, per- Elephants are of course not the only braini-
haps because inside their craniums sit 257 billion acs of the animal kingdom. Dolphins communi-
neurons, about three times the number contained cate through distinct whistles and clicks that may
within the human skull. serve as names or a type of language. Adolescent
Granted, elephant brains are organized in a dif- chimpanzees have outperformed humans on cer-
ferent way than those of their smaller hominid tain memory tests. A few years ago, a group of goats
friends, which is why they aren’t actually smarter figured out how to operate a lever to reach a piece
than people. But they are humanlike in many re- of fruit—and remembered the task 10 months later.
spects. Elephants adapted to life in African forests But elephant intelligence awes us uniquely, per-
and on savannas about the same time humans did, haps because they display such humanlike emotions
immigrated to Europe and Asia and evolved to live as empathy, grief, humor and compassion, and they
long and often migratory lives in complex societies. behave like us in many situations. Elephants have
They also developed a sophisticated communica- been seen using heavy branches to weigh down
tion system and experienced a dramatic increase in fences so they can climb over them. They’ve bran-
brain size for the same reason as people—they live a dished sticks to ward off attackers.
very long time, normally 60 to 70 years. Before em- Legends of elephant memory and intelligence
barking on a group outing, they even debate which date back thousands of years, and scientists have
direction to take, according to Phyllis Lee, author of long observed just how clever the animals can be
a study of elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National in their natural habitat. But until the past 15 years
Park. “It’s wonderful to watch,” she told a newspa- or so, there were few carefully controlled experi-
per, “a real process of negotiation.” ments to compare the memory of elephants to their
24
animal-kingdom peers’. Now, in addition to probing leave the group when they reach sexual maturity, be-
how elephants use their smarts during droughts and tween 12 and 15, related elephant mothers and their
to protect themselves when threatened by enemy offspring stay together for life. They form a tight-
agents, researchers are designing studies to evalu- knit unit, communicating with chirps and rumbles
ate how the animals use their memories to learn to and caring for one another’s calves. Members look
use tools, to work as a group and to problem-solve. to the matriarch, typically the largest female in the
In a 2011 study of Kandula, an elephant at the herd, for guidance, and she may oversee anywhere
National Zoo in Washington, D.C., researchers from 12 to 100 elephants over the course of a day,
hung fruit-dipped bamboo branches within and depending on the availability of water and food.
just out of trunk reach to see if he could learn how The matriarch not only knows each elephant;
to access them. This was a test other elephants had she keeps tabs on them as the herd travels, accord-
failed, in part because researchers had given their ing to research conducted by Scottish psychologist
subjects sticks to nab the fruity bamboo. The prob- Richard Byrne. After collecting urine samples from
lem: when the elephants curled their trunks around elephants living in a park in Kenya, Byrne placed
the sticks, their sense of smell was compromised. them in front of the matriarchs. The females exam-
Earlier participants could not smell the snack to ined the samples with their trunks and started acting
find it. Kandula, however, aced up when the urine did not come
the trial, moving a large cube from their herd. The elephants
in his yard to use as a stepping also reacted when the urine
stool to reach the bamboo. He Imagine taking was from a family member they
learned to do the same with a thought was far away. “Imagine
tractor tire and giant blocks.
your family to taking your family to a crowded
Such research builds on tra- a busy store at department store and the Christ-
ditional studies that have estab- Christmas and mas sales are on,” Byrne told Sci-
lished how elephants’ memo- entific American. “What a job to
ries help them navigate climate keeping track of keep track of . . . four or five fam-
events and other hardships. four or five kids. ily members. These elephants are
For example, in 1958 a severe The elephants doing it with 30 traveling-mates.”
drought ravaged Tanzania’s Which raises the inevitable:
Tarangire National Park, home do it with 30 Can elephants sometimes best
to a large elephant population. travel mates. us at problem-solving? The an-
Almost 40 years later, when swer appears to be a qualified
drought conditions returned, “yes”—as illustrated by Neua Un,
the Wildlife Conservation So- a Thai elephant who participated
ciety of London studied the migration patterns of in a 2011 test of memory and cooperation. One of a
three herds in the park. Among other findings, the dozen pachyderms at a conservation center, Neua
researchers noted that the herd with the youngest Un was to pair up with another elephant and pull a
matriarch, age 33, remained in the northern area of table toward them with ropes. The animals had to
the park, where there was little water or food, and learn to perform the task as a team; otherwise, the
two thirds of the calves died. rope would unravel. Neua Un, however, figured out
But the older matriarchs, ages 45 and 38, who she could use her foot to hold the rope so that her
had survived the trauma of the 1958 drought, fared partner had to do all the work. The shortcut, which
much better. They led their packs out of the north- spoke to the idea that animals with a great capacity
ern portion of the park, theoretically to food and for memory also seem to be astute in terms of in-
water elsewhere. Fewer than 10% of these calves genuity, hadn’t occurred to lead researcher Joshua
died, prompting researchers to hypothesize that Plotnik. While he suspects Neua Un discovered the
the older elephants remembered the location of cheat by accident, Plotnik told NBC he was im-
resources from decades earlier. pressed nevertheless. “It speaks volumes to the flex-
The matriarchal structure of elephant society is, ibility of elephant behavior that she was able to fig-
in fact, crucial to the herd’s survival. Though males ure this out and stick to it,” he said. □
25
Forget-me-nots symbolize
remembering during partings
or after death and a connection
that lasts through time.
THE ESSENTIAL
ACT OF BEING
HUMAN
The paradox of memory is that
we can summon it, but it can control us.
It is exquisite and it hurts
By Steve Leder
ECAUSE I AM A RABBI, I HAVE BEEN quiet beauty of the sanctuary. “Close your eyes and
visiting people in hospitals for breathe in deeply. Breathe out and relax. Breathe in
more than 30 years. One of the deeply again. Breathe in peace. Breathe in quiet.
best techniques I learned long ago Now, place yourself in a comfortable room in your
to help someone who is suffering home or wherever you choose and invite into that
terribly is to take that person on room a loved one who has died. Bring him to life
a sort of mental vacation back to happier times. again in your mind. Bring her to life again in your
“When was your first kiss?” I might ask. “Who was mind—in your memory. See her. See her skin, her
she? Do you know where he is now? What was the hair. Feel his whiskers against your cheek. See his
greatest vacation you ever took? Do you remember smile and his eyes. Be with her. Speak to her. Tell
the first time you ever laid eyes on your wife? What her what you wish for her. Give her your bless-
went through your mind? Best meal you ever ate? ing. Now allow her to leave the room. Be with him.
Funniest thing you ever did? Take me back. . . .” It is Speak to him. Tell him what you wish for him. Give
amazing to watch how memories lift people above him your blessing. Now allow him to leave the room.
their current sorrow into the transcendent meaning Breathe deeply—and when you are ready, open your
embedded in reminiscing. And it works every time. eyes.” Halfway through this visualization, the room
On the holiest day of the year, during a service was awash in tears, hundreds of grown men and
devoted to remembering loved ones who have women, weeping, longing . . . remembering.
died (it’s called Yizkor), I tried something similar To remember is the quintessential act of being
to my hospital mental vacation exercise, but this human. Not in the instinctual, mindless way of
time from the pulpit. “Close your eyes,” I said to salmon swimming upstream to spawn or squirrels
the congregation of 2,000 people seated in the finding their long-ago-hidden acorns, but to use
27
SCIENCE OF MEMORY SPIRITUALITY
memory in a way that summons the past into the It was at that table Dad asked, “How’s work
present and brings the dead back to life—willfully, going?” And I told him, feeling a little sorry for my-
specifically, tearfully. self, that it was really hard to raise all the money we
needed, and I wasn’t sure I could do it. He looked at
MY FATHER DIED peacefully in his sleep after a 10- me, smiled and said, “Az m’schtuptis, gatis—If you
year battle with Alzheimer’s. It is a disease that kills push, it goes.” Almost everything Dad said was a
people twice: once when the mind is lost and once double entendre and dirty. So he wasn’t just talk-
when the body mercifully wears out. Both deaths ing about fundraising. That was him: simple, funny
are painful, but each in its unique way. The first and right. Whatever your goal, just keep pushing.
caused my dad to forget who he was and who ev- He was crude—and hilarious. And when I remem-
eryone who loved him was. In a sense, that forget- ber it all, he is those things again.
ting meant that for him, neither he nor we existed But there is more to memory than laughter and
any longer. There was a new he and a new we cre- love. Weeks after viewing him in a plain pine cas-
ated in the vacuum of his mind; no one and noth- ket—vacuous, cold and dead—I want to forget that
ing was the same. image of my dad. I can’t. Weeks after shoveling earth
That is, unless and until I chose to make use of onto that same casket with a thunk, I want to forget
the most precious of all gifts— that sound. I can’t. I don’t want to
my memories. In order to bring remember. I don’t want to remem-
my father back to life, I merely ber. I don’t want to remember, I
had to remember all those sim- So many times tell myself. Yet I cannot forget
ple things that he loved: A slice the ugliness or the surreal power
from a perfect avocado. A sunny my dad would of his death.
day. Hank Williams and Johnny be walking in And if Freud was even par-
Cash. A joke—the dirtier, the the sunshine tially right, there is a world of
better. Watching All in the Fam- memories not about my dad’s
ily in his vibrating Naugahyde somewhere death but about his life that, try
chair, peeling an orange into a beautiful, and as I may, I can only sort of for-
perfect spiral before handing get. Harsh memories of disci-
out slices to each one of his five
he would look pline and anger, anxiety and
children as if we were a nest of around and ask, fear repressed and banished to
hungry birds. “Are we livin’?” the basement of my subcon-
He didn’t know or care about scious are constantly pounding
sports or hobbies or new gad- on that same basement ceiling
gets like other dads. But he could with a broomstick, reverberat-
back up a semi and operate a crane. My dad taught ing in ways mysterious and dark in the core of my
me to love nature, fishing, pancakes, corned beef conscious life, animating my own flaws, dysfunc-
hash and Mom’s soups. Mostly Dad taught me to tion and vulnerabilities. That is the secret truth of
enjoy a moment during that moment. So many memory: we summon it, yet it controls us, it is ex-
times when he was eating something delicious quisite, and it hurts—like being caressed and spat
and plenty of it, or when we were walking in the on at the same time.
sunshine somewhere beautiful, he would just look
around and ask rhetorically, “Are we livin’?” WHENEVER A VILLAIN is mentioned in classical rab-
The last real conversation I remember having binic literature, his name is followed by an acronym
with my dad before thinking became hard work and for the words “May his name be blotted out.” In the
confusing for him was about my fundraising for the minds of the ancient rabbis, the worst thing one
temple. Mom was there too. We were sitting around could wish upon another, the curse of curses, was
that Formica table in the Palm Springs kitchen that he or she be forgotten. And yet within that very
where they had sat together all those years drink- curse the name of the villain is nevertheless perpet-
ing pots of tea from the stainless-steel thermal con- uated. We can wish that evil, sadness and ugliness
tainer and playing countless rounds of Rummikub. be forgotten, but saying “don’t think about it” is to
28
This is dummy
type for
position only
and will be
think about it—an attempt at squaring a circle; a tioned; a beautiful wish: “May his memory be a
fruitless, impossible denial of the constant that is blessing.” Seemingly different, these two apho-
memory itself. When Santayana said, “Those who risms, “May his name be blotted out” and “May his
forget the past are doomed to repeat it,” he was only memory be a blessing,” speak the same truth—to be
half right. For it is also true that those who only re- remembered is to live beyond the grave in ways sub-
member the past are also doomed to repeat it. This lime and terrible. Of course, sooner or later we are
is the trap of memory that causes so much pain in all “blotted out.” Kafka said, “The meaning of life
so many families. is that it ends,” and that is no less true of memory.
I often counsel people to forgive the sins of oth- When it is gone, we are gone. We don’t like to think
ers who are truly sorry for what they have done. about it, but eventually, in a generation or two or
More times than not, people know they should three or four or five, there will not be a single per-
forgive but say they just can’t. “Rabbi, maybe she’s son left on earth who remembers us. When that day
sorry now, but you have no idea what she did. How comes, we are truly dead.
she hurt me. How he cut me down. How he turned In the meantime, how else can we hold on to the
his back on me when I needed him most. I want to people we love, to the past that defines us, the of-
forgive, but it’s too hard.” fenses that wound us, or the laughter and the love
Long ago I learned that what the unforgiving are that warm us? How else can we hold on to anything
often really saying is not that it is impossible to for- in a world whose centrifuge of speed and stress tries
give but that it is impossible to forget. We have no to whirl us all apart? What else can I do when I miss
choice but to remember pain, the same way we have my dad so much? Nothing, other than embrace this
no choice when asked not to think about a pink el- blessing, this curse, this imperfect gift, this burden,
ephant, but far worse. Such is the grip of memory. this holy vessel: memory.
It is a force unlike any other in our lives.
When a non-villainous person dies, a different Steve Leder is the author of More Beautiful Than
wish is suggested when his or her name is men- Before: How Suffering Transforms Us.
29
THE UPS
AND DOWNS
OF A PERFECT
MEMORY
A small number of people can remember every day of their
respective lives. For them, it’s a good thing. Or is it?
By Amanda MacMillan
OEY DEGRANDIS WAS ABOUT 10 YEARS ended up in California, and I decided to go visit this
old when his parents first realized doctor who was studying these people who seemed
there was something special about to be like me,” he says.
his memory. “Someone would men- That doctor was James McGaugh, a research pro-
tion an event from years ago that we’d fessor in neurobiology and behavior at the Univer-
done as a family, and I’d casually say, sity of California, Irvine. McGaugh began studying
‘Oh, that was a Monday,’ or ‘That hap- HSAM in 2000, after a young woman named Jill
pened on June 20,’ ” says DeGrandis, who is now 34. Price contacted him about her memory “problem.”
“My mom would cross-reference it with old calen- Price, who would later become the first person to
dars she’d kept, and they were a little dumbfounded be diagnosed with HSAM, had complained that her
at how accurate I was.” extraordinary memory was a burden. “Whenever I
DeGrandis showed off his skill that year at a see a date flash on the television (or anywhere else
magic show at school, wowing his audience by cor- for that matter) I automatically go back to that day
rectly identifying the day of the week for any given and remember where I was, what I was doing, what
date in recent history. And for the next 15 years or day it fell on and on and on and on and on,” she had
so, DeGrandis thought of his talent mostly as a neat written in an email to McGaugh. “It is non-stop, un-
party trick: not something everyone could do, but controllable, and totally exhausting.”
not something with much significance, either. He By 2010, McGaugh and his colleagues had iden-
would later find that there are upsides—and sur- tified a few others with an uncanny ability to link
prising downsides—to an almost perfect memory. calendar dates with events, both major news and
In 2010, when DeGrandis was 26, he saw a seg- mundane personal details. After appearing on 60
ment on 60 Minutes featuring a handful of peo- Minutes, McGaugh received more than 600 emails
ple with a similar ability: a condition now known and phone calls from people—like DeGrandis—who
as highly superior autobiographical memory, or thought they might also have this ability.
HSAM. “I was on a road trip with a friend and Ultimately, only about 60 of those people were
30
SCIENCE OF MEMORY PERFECT RECALL
Fewer than 100 people have been diagnosed with HSAM, including Joey DeGrandis, left; Aureliaen
Hayman, who was featured in the documentary The Boy Who Can’t Forget, center at left, with
psychology professor Giuliana Mazzoni, who tested his memory; and Jake Hausier, a teen from St. Louis.
identified by McGaugh as actually having HSAM, mal when it comes to remembering things such as
including DeGrandis, and opted to participate in faces or phone numbers. The ability is not the same
the researchers’ ongoing studies. (In his everyday as a so-called photographic memory, which allows
life, DeGrandis works in marketing—in a job that people to vividly recall details from a scene they’ve
has nothing to do with his special ability, he says.) observed for only a short time; nor is it the same as
He has enjoyed meeting others with HSAM and has a talent held by “memory athletes” who use mne-
been struck by the things they have in common. monic devices to remember long strings of data.
DeGrandis says he’s struggled from depression “I’m not great with names or with mundane de-
and anxiety, which he believes may be linked to his tails like whether I brushed my teeth today or where
inability to let certain things go—a common theme I put my keys,” says DeGrandis. “My mind is always
with HSAM study participants. “I do tend to dwell moving and filled with so many other things, and
on things longer than the average person,” he says, maybe that contributes, ironically, to a poorer short-
“and when something painful does happen, like a term memory.”
breakup or the loss of a family member, I don’t for- Nearly two decades after the first case of HSAM
get those feelings.” was identified, there’s still a lot we don’t know about
Research also suggests that people with HSAM the condition. The UC Irvine researchers, for in-
tend to have obsessive traits. “Some subjects, like stance, plan to conduct functional MRI scans on
Price, focused on orderliness,” McGaugh wrote in people in the HSAM study to see if their brains work
Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference. differently while they are retrieving information.
“Some were germ-avoidant, and some had hobbies Understanding the neurobiology behind HSAM
that involved intense, focused and sustained ef- may provide insights into how the brain stores and
forts,” he added. It’s not known yet whether these retrieves memories, says McGaugh, and may even
traits are the result of their superior memory or if be useful in the fight against Alzheimer’s disease
both are caused by another underlying factor. and other forms of dementia.
And while people with superior memories have As for DeGrandis, he’s happy to lend his mind
an uncanny talent for linking dates and events, they to science in the hopes that it will ultimately help
do occasionally make mistakes. “Their memories people who have trouble remembering things—not
are much more detailed than ours and last for a lon- forgetting them. And although he and others like
ger period of time, but they’re still not video record- him sometimes feel burdened by this special tal-
ings,” says McGaugh. “Memory is a distracting pro- ent, DeGrandis is ultimately glad to have it. “It can
cess, and what we pull from our brains isn’t always be frustrating, but it’s also really wonderful to have
entirely accurate.” easy access to happy memories,” he says. “I really
People with HSAM are also no better than nor- try not to take that for granted.” □
32
ture of an automobile accident,

and some were overlaid onto neu-
tral images, like a boat or a house.
Later, the students were
prompted to recall words. Overall,
memory performance did not dif-
fer based on their anxiety levels:
those with low anxiety were better
at remembering some words, and
those with high anxiety were better
at remembering others.
There was one interesting differ-
ence. The study authors suspected
that words displayed over nega-
tive images would be remembered
more accurately than words dis-
played over neutral images, since
previous research has indicated
that emotional context can make
memories stronger. In Fernandes’s
trial, the people with higher anxi-
ety levels better remembered the
words over negative images, sug-
gesting that they’re more suscep-
tible to this type of influence.
Sounds like a win for anxiety,
right? Yet the aptitude may come
with a downside, Fernandes warns,
with high-anxiety sufferers adopt-
ing a “negative retrieval mode”
when recalling events, which could
lead to biased memories.
In a new situation, anxiety may
Why help you remember the event more
vividly. “It . . . makes you attuned
Most people have probably expe-
rienced this type of memory bias,
Anxious to details you wouldn’t be other-

wise,” says Myra Fernandes, a psy-
comments Fernandes’s co-author
Christopher Lee. “Say you’re hav-
People chology professor at the University

of Waterloo in Canada and co-
ing the worst day possible—you
slept through your alarm, you
May Have author of a 2018 study, published

in Brain Sciences, on anxiety and
slipped and fell in mud—and then
the barista at Starbucks asks you
Better memory. “That’s a plus if you’re try-

ing to remember something later.”
a totally neutral question, like if
you want whipped cream on your
Recall In Fernandes’s study, 80 under-

graduate psychology students
mocha,” he says. “Because you
entered this situation in such a
negative mindset, you may remem-
But at the same time, were screened for their levels of ber him being rude or hostile or
their memories may everyday anxiety—asked, for exam- horrible for some reason, even
be negatively biased if ple, how often in the past week when he’s not.” The more anxious
they’d experienced dryness of the you are, the more vulnerable you
they’ve had a bad day mouth or feelings of shakiness. may be to this effect, says Lee.
BY AMANDA MACMILLAN The students were then instructed Still, a little bit of anxiety is
to study a set of words as they probably better than none at all,
flashed across a computer screen, especially before events, says Fer-
and to answer simple questions nandes. “Having butterflies in your
about their spelling or meaning. stomach might actually make that
Some of the words were overlaid information more memorable to
onto negative images, like a pic- you later on.”
33
2
Why We
Forget
Many of us are anxious about
losing our memories, but letting
go of certain information allows
us to store what is important.
35
FORGETTING
CHILDHOOD
Our memories shape and define
us. So why do our earliest
experiences start to fade when
we are just 3 years old?
By Patrick Rogers
’D LIKE TO SHARE AN EPISODE FROM MY

early youth, a minor medical emer-
gency, quickly resolved. I was a healthy
child and on schedule with regard to
all developmental milestones when,
sometime before my second birthday,
I began to experience sharp pain in my
ears. I shrieked in my crib and clawed at my ears
with my hands. Multiple trips to the pediatrician
did nothing for the pain until I was admitted to the
local hospital, where a surgeon performed a simple
procedure to alleviate the pressure behind my ear-
drums. I was cured. Still, my mother recalls holding
me in her arms all night long, so worried was she
about her youngest child.
I, on the other hand, remember nothing. The de-
tails of this childhood trauma, in addition to ev-
erything that happened in the two years that pre-
ceded it and all of the events of my life in the 12
37
SCIENCE OF MEMORY FORGETTING CHILDHOOD
months or so that followed, are completely lost to brain’s messages to circulate) surges between eight
me. In fact, I remember nothing until my family and 24 months.
moved the following year to another town, where A young person’s brain is not fully mature, with
a neighbor’s cat wandered into our yard and sat be- all of its memory components working in tandem,
neath a shrub. That is my indelible, and rather mun- until the mid-20s. What happens in the years lead-
dane, first memory. But before that, the sights and ing up to that point? Neuroscientists have proposed
smells, the taste of favorite foods, the birthday pres- that synapses formed in that early, busiest period
ents and bug bites of my early youth—all are com- of development may be overwritten by fresh neural
pletely gone. connections, essentially creating a blank slate for
Scientists have a name for this: childhood am- the fully forming human brain to populate with a
nesia. As infants, even without the language skills lifetime of new recollections. Other theories focus
to describe them, we can store away information in on the lack of language and immature cognitive
our brains and then retrieve it for later use. Yet be- skills as reasons that the pre-3 set can’t seem to hold
ginning at the age of about 31⁄2 years, the memory on to their thoughts and feelings into adulthood.
chips of the human mind begin to experience failure.
Our childhood recollections start to fade, and by the THE EPISODES OF our lives—our autobiographical
age of 7, they are almost entirely memories—are what shape our
erased, so that a teenager recalls sense of self and define us. Al-
no more of her earliest years than though the literature includes
a 50-year-old woman does. By the age of 7, many examples of adults who
It’s no surprise that we retain do have precocious memories
some facts and experiences but
our first memories of events like the birth of a sib-
forget the others. “The first thing are almost ling, these sequences of personal
that we have to accept is that entirely erased, history are largely elusive, which
most of our memories don’t last, makes childhood amnesia, a con-
and that’s true across our life- so that a teen dition that is considered univer-
time,” says Robyn Fivush, a pro- recalls no more sal, so compelling to study today.
fessor of psychology at Emory of her early “Knowing how autobiographical
University who studies autobi- memory develops is critically
ographical memory. “Are they childhood than a important to understanding our-
completely forgotten? That’s 50-year-old. selves as psychic beings,” wrote
kind of controversial because psychologist Patricia Bauer of
how do you say they can never, Emory University in a 2014
ever be remembered again? But study that plotted the onset of
certainly they become very, very difficult to access.” childhood amnesia. “Remembering yourself in the
To the average observer, the timing of this ac- past is how you know who you are today.”
celerated loss of data during the pre-school years is People have grappled with the puzzling void of
also confounding. It is the very time of life when the early youth for centuries. Swiss philosopher Jean-
brain develops rapidly in both size and complexity. Jacques Rousseau observed in the 1700s that chil-
Its weight jumps from 25% of adult size at birth to dren lack “true memory,” and the Russian novel-
75% by age 2, suggesting more room for memory ist Leo Tolstoy more than a century later sought to
and cognitive power. Yet the brain’s development reconcile the period of his life he did not remember
is uneven: most of the cells of the hippocampus, with his sure knowledge that it had existed. “It is
the center of memory and emotion in the brain, are a strange and awful thought that from my birth to
formed before we are born, for instance, while the the age of three, during which time I was suckled, I
area that joins the hippocampus to the brain’s cor- began to crawl, to walk, and to speak,” Tolstoy wrote
tex, the dentate gyrus, doesn’t mature until after in his essay “First Recollections.” “Yet in spite of all
the first year of age. In the prefrontal cortex, an- my efforts I cannot find anything to remember ex-
other of the brain’s memory makers, the density of cept the two facts of swaddling and bathing. When
synapses (the specialized connectors that allow the did my existence commence?”
38
For a trial of infants’ long-term memory,

1-year-olds were tested in an unusual
environment and an ordinary room.
When the father of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, probably experience sharp and detailed recall. They
coined the term “childhood amnesia” in 1905, he have the capacity for short-term memory, which al-
described it as a self-defense mechanism that cast lows them to repeat simple sequences like drink-
“a veil” of forgetfulness over disturbing sexual ing from a bottle, as well as the type of long-term
and Oedipal memories. Contemporary research- memory that scientists call declarative or semantic,
ers have taken a more expansive view of childhood which includes knowledge of facts.
amnesia—we lose more than just lusty memories, Young children don’t need words to convince
after all—and focused on language and the physical us that they can remember: just ask a proud par-
development of the brain when examining the in- ent whether the face of their infant lights up every
ability of young children to form an autobiographi- time they walk in the room, or note how a baby may
cal account of their lives. become fussy in the doctor’s office waiting room,
When we look back at distant memories, they suggesting unpleasant associations with the place.
tend to be fragmentary and vague and are frequently Proof that pre-linguistic children have memories
laden with emotions. Even when we recall a vividly independent of physical cues has arrived only rel-
detailed flash of awareness, like a grandmother’s atively recently. In a landmark study published by
polka-dot dress, the background and context are in- Emory’s Fivush in 1987, children as young as 21⁄2
distinct. In real time, however, infants and toddlers years old were observed reaching back into their
39
SCIENCE OF MEMORY FORGETTING CHILDHOOD
pasts to pluck out events that had occurred up to six to four years. But then they experienced a die-off
months earlier, including one little boy who recol- of memories after the age of 7 that would be con-
lected taking a glass ornament from the Christmas sidered catastrophic in adults. Bauer has proposed
tree that broke and cut his hand. that early-childhood memory is a two-sided coin in
“That sounds like a very elaborate narrative, but which forgetting is just as important as remember-
what he actually said was ‘ball’ and ‘cut’ or some- ing: “Indeed, it is the apparently ‘off the charts’ rate
thing along those lines. It took the adult to say, of forgetting that makes the phenomenon so myste-
‘What ball?’ and ‘Did it break?’ ” says Fivush, who rious,” she wrote in the American Psychological As-
believes that the memories that stay with us from sociation’s Psychological Science Agenda in 2004.
early childhood are those that have been integrated
into our autobiographies. “Did the boy have a mem- WHAT, THEN, MAKES us forget? Underneath the
ory of this event? Yes. Was he able to put it into a cranium, neuroscientists are looking at the phys-
more coherent narrative structure that may allow ical building blocks of human recollection, the
him to remember it for longer? No.” electrically excitable neurons that join together
In a subsequent research paper in the U.K, to form synapses. In the hippocampus, these new
12-month-old babies were shown how to play with cells are constantly generated in one area, the den-
a set of toys without being allowed tate gyrus, and then migrate to an-
to actually touch them. When the other, the granule cell layer, where
infants were tested again four they join the existing circuitry. In
weeks later, half of them retained Children studies of mice, researchers arti-
the know-how to play with the ficially sped up neuron produc-
toys. If people in the past theo-
whose parents tion in this part of the brain. But
rized that childhood amnesia oc- encouraged in accompanying memory tests,
curs because babies don’t have the them to the mice showed a higher rate of
words and sophisticated cognitive forgetfulness as memory capac-
power needed to form memories, elaborate on ity was physically growing. The
it’s now evident that even pre- recollections, researchers from Toronto’s Hos-
verbal infants can encode, store saying “Tell me pital for Sick Kids hypothesized
and recall lasting memories, just that their brains were remodeling
not permanent ones. more,” had rich at a rapid rate, just as humans do
Less is known about why the li- recall later. in early childhood, and shedding
brary of the young mind rapidly existing memory in the process.
depletes itself at about the same Out with the old, in with the new.
time children start school. When Bauer’s study of childhood for-
Emory University’s Bauer and her team set out to getting in 2014 also provided clues about the critical
probe the dynamics of childhood amnesia in 2013, role that language may play in determining which
they recruited more than 80 3-year-olds in Min- bits of information make the jump from short-term
nesota. The toddlers were questioned by their to long-term memory and which are left to oblivion.
own mothers about six recent events—camping, Children whose parents encouraged them to elabo-
birthday parties, visits to relatives—as researchers rate on their recollections by saying “Tell me more”
looked on. The children then returned to the lab or “What happened?” had richer recall later com-
years later at specific ages, from 5 to 9, to have their pared with those whose parents confirmed or re-
memories tested again. peated their replies. The act of pondering and artic-
On their second visits, children between the ulating the facts of our lives, of rehearsing our own
ages of 5 and 7 could still recall about two thirds autobiographies, appeared to mark certain facts and
to three quarters of what they had remembered at experience as candidates for memory consolidation.
age 3, yet by age 8 or 9 they could summon only Units of information that arrive in the brain sepa-
about a third of their early recollections. As seen be- rately from the sensory organs are woven together
fore, the young subjects were robust memory mak- into multifaceted memories that are harder to for-
ers, forming strong recollections that lasted for up get—the memory skill that the little boy with the
40
Christmas ornament hadn’t yet mastered.

Language also plays a role in the generation of
false memories from childhood, specifically when
other people script the stories. The Swiss psychol-
ogist Jean Piaget famously insisted that his first
memory was of his nurse fending off a kidnapping
attempt on the Champs-Élysées when he was still
in the pram. When Piaget was 15, the nurse admit-
ted she had invented the story, and even then he
could still picture the scene in detail.
This type of “memory of a memory” occurs
often. It’s not unusual, for instance, for siblings to
argue over which one was the girl who flew head-
first from a swing at a family picnic and landed in a
puddle while wearing her favorite dress. In a 2018
survey of more than 6,000 adults in the U.K., most
reported their first memory, predictably, in the
first half of the third year of life—which is when
researchers have shown that first memories usually
fall. Those who departed from the norm tended to
veer on the young side, with nearly 2,500 (about
40%!) reporting memories from before the age of 2.
Almost 15% said they could recall events from age
1 and earlier—a “highly improbable” occurrence,
according to the study’s authors from the depart-
ments of psychology of three British universities.
As an explanation of their unexpected findings,
the U.K. psychologists proposed that people take
imagery from photographs, home videos and child-
hood events and combine them with a fragment of
visual information. “Over time, this combination
of imagery and fact begins to be experienced as a
memory,” wrote lead author Lucy Justice on the
website The Conversation. “Perhaps, for reasons
not yet known, we have a psychological need to fic-
tionalize memories from times of our lives that we
are unable to remember. For now, these ‘stories’ re-
main a mystery.”
A mystery, perhaps, but not really a surprise. We Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, here in
wouldn’t have Ancestry.com and write memoirs if 1926, believed childhood amnesia was
we didn’t feel a strong impulse to fill in the facts of caused by the repression of traumatic,
our beginnings. For every person who tries to fill psychosexual memories.
the lapses of early childhood with invented or bor-
rowed memories, there are others who have no such
memories and worry there’s something wrong with was taken to the ER. Though the girl had no recol-
them. There’s not. “Our experiences, all of our expe- lection of the incident later, she became hysterically
riences, impact our bodies and our brains, whether frightened whenever her parents served chicken
we remember them or not,” says Fivush, who re- for dinner. “We can say, ‘I have no idea why I’m
calls a subject in a memory study who swallowed a like this,’ says Fivush, “but you look in the medical
chicken bone at the age of perhaps 14 months and record, or family history, and there it is.” □
41
Meck, second from right,

posed with her brother Rob,
mother, and sisters Diane and
Barb on Easter day, 1968.
A LIFE
LOST TO
AMNESIA
Su Meck was just 22 in 1988
when a ceiling fan fell on
her head, wiping away her
memory and personality. She
began her second life in a
house she didn’t know, with a
family she didn’t recognize
By Su Meck with
Daniel de Visé
43
SCIENCE OF MEMORY THE CURSE OF AMNESIA
fter being in the hospital for only I was shown the door.
three weeks, I was released to go To this day Barb tells me, “You
were not ready. You should have
home. That in itself was a small gone to a rehab facility, or you
miracle, because my husband, should have gone home with a
Jim, was initially told that with crew of therapists; someone to
help you with speech, a therapist
injuries such as mine, it wasn’t unusual for
to help with gross motor skills, and
people to stay hospitalized for eight months, an occupational therapist to help
maybe longer. But medically speaking, my MRI with fine-motor tasks. You couldn’t
scans did not show the doctors any kind of write. Walking and moving around
was hard for you. You couldn’t even
persistent or residual damage to my brain. So use your left side, and you were
in their opinion, I was all better. In the words left-handed!”
and spirit of those evangelical preachers, Let’s think about this for a sec-
ond, shall we? And part of this will
“I was healed!” The rehabilitation staff told
just be me speculating, of course.
Jim, “Our goal is to get someone who is 5 to Did I know who I was? After three
15 percent functional to 20 to 30 percent.” weeks in the hospital? I probably
Jim was told that I was quite possibly at 70 knew my name was Su Meck. Did
I know Jim, Benjamin, and Pat-
or 80 percent. I was the valedictorian of head rick? Did I understand husband?
injury patients. Marriage? Son? Brother? Mother?
Father? My guess is no, I didn’t. I
The hospital records present my release as if it probably didn’t have a clue as to how to take care of
was a matter of mutual agreement. That is how Jim myself, let alone two very young boys. Was leaving
remembers it. But in hindsight, my discharge seems the hospital really a safe, smart, logical next step?
rather abrupt, certainly considering that three days Looking back, I don’t think it was safe, smart, or
earlier, a neuropsychologist had described me as logical. And yet, that is exactly what happened.
moderately to severely impaired in five major cog- Whatever the reason, I was released and taken
nitive areas. to live in a house I did not remember. The 1970s
“I remember Jim kept saying, ‘We’ve got to get gold-flecked linoleum and shag carpeting, the green
her out of the hospital, because they keep dropping scratchy couch, the brown kitchen cupboards, the
her on her head,’ ” my sister Barb recalls. large backyard surrounded by a privacy fence: None
My mom: “I do think you should have been in of these things registered with me. Jim remembers
the hospital longer than you were.” me walking hesitantly down the hallway that led
Here are a few of my own thoughts about all of from the family room back to the bedrooms. He re-
this now: Jim was driving everyone crazy at the calls me just staring at all of the family photographs
hospital with his demands. He didn’t know what to that were hanging there. “That’s me!” I said, point-
do with our young sons Benjamin and Patrick, he ing to my image. “And that’s me, too!” I recognized
had to go to work and he had run out of, or used up, myself in the more recent photographs, but I had
all his options for babysitting. I think I was some- no recollection of the places where even a single
how “fast-tracked” out of the hospital, either be- one of the pictures had been taken, or any of the
cause of Jim’s behavior or our medical insurance stories behind them. I was not able to identify any
coverage. All of a sudden, people started writ- of the other people—other friends and family—in
ing in my chart that my problem was most likely the photos. It was sort of like being airbrushed into
something psychological rather than physical, and a life. A real-life Twilight Zone.
Excerpted from the book I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia by Su Meck with Daniel de Visé.
Copyright © 2014 by Susan E. Meck. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
44
Meck and her husband, Jim, in Texas, in

the spring of 1986. At the time, she was
pregnant with their first child, Benjamin.
I walked into the kitchen and opened every sin- accident, when I was still in the hospital, one of the
gle cupboard and drawer. There was nothing rec- things I was taught how to do was make tuna fish
ognizable about any of this stuff. I probably didn’t salad. I am sure tuna fish salad was used as a “train-
even know what most of the items were called, or ing food” for food preparation and kitchen safety
what they could possibly be used for. The hospital purposes because there are a lot of different steps in
was all I knew. Everything in this house was unfa- preparing tuna fish, as well as a lot of learning how
miliar, and I can only imagine how bewildering and to use kitchen tools. I was taught everything from
daunting that unfamiliarity would have been to me. operating a can opener, to safely using a sharp knife
What would it have felt like for me to not know even and cutting board, to using a measuring cup, to stir-
the names of objects in my own home? But then I ring all the ingredients together with a spoon in a
think, did I even care? big bowl, and then to finally manipulating another
This is another thing I don’t remember: after my knife to spread the tuna on bread. I was taught how
45
SCIENCE OF MEMORY THE CURSE OF AMNESIA
to properly wash and peel fruits and vegetables, and of what any of us had done the day before, or what
even how to boil an egg in a pot of water on the stove. the plan was for that new day. Each day the world
Armed with this vast expanse of knowledge, I beyond my front door was an absolute unknown.
was sent home with the expectation that I would Jim says that our family was full of Lord of the Flies
be able to feed my family and myself. incidents, in that he never knew exactly what he
And that is exactly what I did. I fed my fam- would come home to after work each day. Would
ily tuna fish. Breakfast. Lunch. Dinner. Did any- I be there with Benjamin and Patrick? Would we
one complain? I don’t all be gone? Would
know. Did Jim give the boys be playing
the boys other stuff together in the back-
to eat? Did he make yard all by them-
himself other stuff selves with me no-
to eat? Again, I don’t where in sight?
know. Did I attempt Would I be there,
to cook or prepare but have no idea
anything else? I seri- where Benjamin or
ously doubt it. I had Patrick were? Would
been told that “tuna the bathtub be over-
fish equals meal, and flowing? Would the
meal is what you eat.” oven or stove be on?
I think Jim prob- I am terrified when
ably sensed that I I think about what
needed help, but he that must have been
was back at work try- like for the boys and
ing to make up for me. I honestly do
all the time he had not know how we all
missed. Plus, the neu- survived those first
rologists kept telling days, weeks, months,
him that there was and even years.
nothing wrong with My mom wanted
me. Jim’s parents of- desperately to help
fered to pay for a out somehow, as well
live-in nanny to help as give Jim a break.
with the boys, which But my younger
Meck in the hospital with son Benjamin. Her
might relieve some of brother, Mark, was
husband brought the bear in an attempt to trigger
my stress. Jim asked her memory. Opposite, a letter Meck wrote her still living at home
around and soon grandparents six weeks after the accident. and was not yet driv-
hired a woman. And ing. Mom felt like she
for a few weeks she couldn’t very well
did, indeed, keep the boys and me alive, keep the desert him to come to Fort Worth to look after me.
house from burning down, and most likely she pre- Instead it was decided that Jim would drive Ben-
vented several major catastrophes. However, she jamin, Patrick, and me to Houston to stay with my
was a devout Christian, and when she came upon parents for a week. My parents now feel incredibly
Jim’s extensive stash of pornography, she told him guilty about how little they understood of my new
she could no longer work in our home. reality. My mom says that all she really knew was
Suddenly Benjamin, Patrick, and I were on our that I had this head injury and that I had trouble
own once again. I would wake up each morning with remembering things. The letters I sent her looked
no memory of what had occurred the previous day. as if a first-grader had written them, “all phonetic
I recognized Jim and the boys simply because I saw misspellings and shaky script on lined paper,” but
them every day, but I would have no recollection still she and my dad were not overly concerned.
46
Meck, center, with, from left, daughter

Kassidy, son Benjamin, husband Jim
and son Patrick, in May 2008
It is highly unlikely that I in fact recognized ei- Mom thinks it likely that I woke up every morn-
ther of my parents when I climbed out of the car in ing that week in Houston unsure of where I was or
their driveway. But because Jim had prepared me why I was there. I must have been terribly confused
for this particular reunion, I was able to greet them to be yet again in a new, unfamiliar place, with un-
both with a sort of affection and warmth. Even so, familiar people. But Mom thinks I would eventually
my parents say that they noticed immediately how hear the recognizable sounds of Benjamin and Pat-
much I had changed. They had known me as the rick, and then I would slowly find my bearings, and
family troublemaker, loud, defiant, and stubborn. greet my parents as if nothing was amiss.
Now my personality was completely different. My My dad remembers something peculiar about
dad was surprised at how cooperative and friendly that visit. I wouldn’t enter the backyard, because of
I appeared, nothing like the person I had been even the pool, which absolutely petrified me. He and my
a few months earlier. mom found that surprising, since I had always been
48
a strong swimmer and loved the water. I had even sation about sex. I didn’t exactly understand when
been a lifeguard as a teenager. Once again, they he tried to explain what it meant to be a “mother”
seemed not to understand the extent of my im- to Benjamin and Patrick. And being a “wife” to Jim
pairment. Nobody could comprehend that I was a was even more beyond my comprehension.
different person, a new person, just observing and I suppose once upon a time, three years before,
learning stuff as I went along. I seriously doubt I Jim and I had fallen in love. After the accident, I
even understood my own fear of my parents’ pool. had no concept of “love.” I knew Jim was there,
Because I was so deathly afraid of the pool out and I quickly became dependent on him, and later
back, and wouldn’t go near it, we usually spent became dependent on the boys, but I didn’t re-
the hottest part of the day with the boys in the ally know him very well. I didn’t know the most
second-floor family game room playing with toys basic things about him, like what he enjoyed doing
that had belonged to us Miller kids years before. in his spare time, what his favorite foods were,
One afternoon I walked over to the piano and sat what genre of books he liked to read, what music
down. It was the same piano that I had learned to he liked to listen to, and hundreds of other little
play on as a child. I placed my fingers on the key- details. I don’t think I even really cared so much
board and began playing Scott Joplin’s “The En- about any of that stuff, either. I wasn’t aware that
tertainer.” Mom says I played it I was supposed to care.
nearly flawlessly from start to However, Jim somehow still
finish. From memory. When I loved me. He still knew me, or
was through, I turned to Mom During the week I at least the “me” I had been,
and asked, “What was that? visited my parents which still looked like me. He
Where did that come from?” knew everything about me;
Mom told me that “The En-
in Houston, I kept what I liked to do, eat, read,
tertainer” was a song that I asking for my listen to, as well as every other
had learned for a recital as a husband, Jim. But trivial detail.
child. I was not able to ever Jim remembered our love
repeat that performance. It when he finally from before the accident, and
was just gone. A kind of door- arrived, I had no he missed it. He tells me that
way had been opened momen- idea who he was. when we were back at Ohio
tarily, and then just as quickly, Wesleyan, we “went from
it was ruthlessly closed. being friends to being friends-
All that week, I kept asking with-benefits and eventually
for Jim several times a day. But when he finally did to a committed and exclusive relationship.” He
arrive the following Saturday afternoon, my mom talks about how he and I “would finish each other’s
says I had no idea who he was; in fact, I was afraid sentences.” He says we were inseparable and “when
of him. Jim says he saw in my eyes instantly that we were together, we were simply more.” And now
I had once again forgotten him. Of course he was that particular Su that Jim had known was gone. I
upset by that realization, but what could he do? was utterly naive not only sexually, but emotion-
Apparently, I made my younger brother, Mark, ally as well. I just wasn’t ready for such adult feel-
come with us on a walk that evening, because I did ings, and wouldn’t be for a few years.
not want to be alone with this tall, curly-headed
stranger. For a long time after Meck’s injury, she suffered
A few days after returning home to Fort Worth, both retrograde amnesia and anterograde amne-
Jim sat down with me and taught me how to shave sia, the inability to form new memories. She would
my legs. In fact, he taught me (and retaught me wake up “lost” in unfamiliar places and even today
again and again and again) most of what I know does not remember the first 22 years of her life. But
about personal grooming. Come to think of it, Jim in 2014, 26 years after her accident, Meck graduated
taught me pretty much everything I know about from Smith College and released her memoir, I Forgot
almost everything. Several weeks (or maybe it was to Remember. Today, she speaks to survivors of
months) later, there was even an awkward conver- traumatic brain injury and continues to write. □
49
MEMORABLE
MOVIES
Amnesia has been a frequent
Hollywood topic since the talkies.
Do they get it right?
By Emily Joshu
In the new ﬁlm Welcome to Marwen, Steve

Carell’s character forgets his early life after
being beaten by thugs. The theme of memory
loss is a Hollywood favorite because it is so
relatable, but many movies gloss over the hard
science, says Boston neuroscientist Steve
Ramirez. “Most people with amnesia aren’t
Matt Damon going on these super CIA spy
scenarios,” he adds.
1
1 / BOURNE, THE SERIES (2002–2016)
Former spy Jason Bourne awakes on a boat

with amnesia, two bullet holes in his back and
one key to his identity—the account number
to a safe deposit box. On the upside, Bourne
can still fight, shoot a gun and drive. Retaining
these motor memories can be typical for
amnesiacs, says Ramirez. “You remember how
to walk. You remember how to breathe.”
2 / SPELLBOUND (1945)
A new convert to psychoanalysis, producer

David O. Selznick wanted to spread the
word about therapy and worked with Alfred
2
Hitchcock on this thriller. In it, Ingrid Bergman
plays a shrink who helps her colleague
and love interest, Gregory Peck, overcome 3
amnesia. Today, some critics dismiss
Spellbound’s portrayal of therapy as muddled.
3 / ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE

SPOTLESS MIND (2004)
In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,

former lovers try to forget their relationship by
having their memories erased. What scientists
50
find misleading is the portrayal of memories

as localized, says Ramirez: “Many now think
memory requires a kind of symphony across
the brain for it to materialize rather than living
in this one corner.”
4 / THE VOW (2012)
An example of amnesia trivialized, with the twist

that the plot is based on an actual couple. Kim
and Krickitt Carpenter were newlyweds when a
car accident robbed Krickitt of her memories of
Kim. In the movie, the wife character attempts
to reconnect with her husband. Reviewer Roger
Ebert criticized the film for not addressing
4
the difficulty of loving someone you can’t
remember. “One can imagine the anguish of
5 the case in real life,” wrote Ebert.
5 / MEMENTO (2000)
After sustaining a head injury in an attack that

kills his wife, a man played by Guy Pearce is
unable to form new memories. But determined
to solve the murder, Pearce tattoos clues on
his body. Memento’s narrative is told in two
story lines, one moving forward in time and
one backward, which captures an amnesiac’s
fractured identity, says Ramirez.
6 / 50 FIRST DATES (2004)

6 This rom-com, for many scientists, is one of the
worst offenders in terms of misrepresenting
amnesia. In it, Adam Sandler doggedly courts
Drew Barrymore, even though she wakes
every morning having forgotten the day
before. “Sometimes Hollywood romanticizes
[amnesia] to the point of trivializing it. In reality
it changes us to our core,”says Ramirez.
7 / FINDING NEMO (2003)
When overprotective clownfish Marlin sets

out to find his lost son Nemo, he crosses
7 paths with Dory, a royal-blue tang who wants
to help but is hampered by her three-second
memory. Contrary to popular belief, fish do not
have tiny attention spans. But, says Ramirez,
Dory’s amnesia experience would be accurate
for a human. He compares her to Pearce’s
determined character in Memento; neither let
their conditions stop them from their goals.
51
AGING, MEMORY
AND MYTHS
Although the ability to recall memories may begin to decline
in your 20s, your fact database peaks as late as 70
By Hallie Levine
T’S EASY TO PANIC IF YOU MISPLACE because of baby boomers, who are more likely than
your car keys or forget a person’s name. their parents to be college-educated, with profes-
But the truth is, these types of mem- sional white-collar jobs that involve a lot of think-
ory lapses are common and can hap- ing. And although younger people may be able to
pen to anyone at any age. “Oftentimes, recall things more quickly, older people have an
simply being stressed and multitasking advantage because they’re sometimes able to take
can make you forgetful,” explains Gary short cuts. “The older you are, the more likely you
Small, director of the UCLA Longevity Center. The are to draw on past experiences or wide social net-
good news is that dementia isn’t a normal part of works to solve a problem,” says Small.
aging—fewer than 10% of people in America over
the age of 65 have the disease, according to a 2017 Myth: Supplements can help reduce memory
study published in the medical journal JAMA. loss » Supplements are unlikely to help, period,
Memory loss, of course, is real, and some types of says Stephen Rao, chair of the Cleveland Clinic Lou
memory—mainly your ability to think quickly and Ruvo Center for Brain Health. Consider fish oil,
recall information—start to decline as early as your often touted as a memory aide. A 2012 review by the
second decade. Episodic memory, which captures Cochrane Library, a network of health researchers,
the what, where and when of our daily lives (for ex- looked at studies of the use of fish-oil supplements
ample, what time a meeting is) can begin to deteri- in cognitively healthy older people and saw no im-
orate starting at about age 30, as do our abilities to provement. Similarly, a study published in the med-
process information, hold on to working memory ical journal The Lancet Neurology of almost 3,000
and multitask. But there are ways to work around adults over age 70 with memory complaints found
this. Here, a closer look at some of the myths and that the herb ginkgo biloba didn’t reduce rates of
realities surrounding aging and memory. developing Alzheimer’s compared with those who
took a placebo. DHEA supplements seem to fall into
Myth: It’s all downhill after age 20. » Although the same category. DHEA is a hormone produced by
short-term memory peaks in your 20s—and starts the adrenal glands, and DHEA supplements—often
to drop at around age 35—crystallized intelligence, made from yams or soy—have been touted as a new
or the accumulation of facts and knowledge, peaks fountain of youth. A Cochrane review of five clini-
in the 60s or as late as 70, according to a Harvard cal trials, however, found no proof that the supple-
study from 2015. That’s very different from what we ments were effective.
would have expected to see just 30 years ago, largely What does work: A Mediterranean-style diet—
52
SCIENCE OF MEMORY AGING AND YOUR MEMORY
sion diagnosed and treated. Middle-aged individu-

als who reported moderate to severe anxiety have
been shown to be more likely to develop dementia
later in life. “We know that anxiety is associated
with higher stress-hormone levels, and, in fact,
human studies have found that if you inject some-
one with a stress hormone like cortisol, it causes
temporary memory impairment,” says Small.
Reality: Exercise can boost memory. » “It’s

the most important thing you can do to keep your
memory sharp and reduce risk of dementia as you
age,” stresses Rao of the Cleveland Clinic. Rao is
currently doing research among people who have
an APOE4 allele, which increases risk of later de-
veloping Alzheimer’s. In comparing the MRIs of
the brains of sedentary people and people who
exercise at least three times a week, he’s found
that the hippocampus in the sedentary group de-
creased over 18 months, while the active individ-
Yoga instructor Tao Porchon- uals’ stayed the same. Another study, from 2016,
Lynch is 100 years old. found that the more active older adults were, the
larger their hippocampus. It’s important not to just
exercise regularly but to limit sitting as well, adds
loaded with fruits, vegetables, potatoes, olive oil, Small, who found that adults between 45 and 75
fish, legumes and whole grains—was linked to a who sat at least three hours a day had substantial
30% to 35% decrease in risk of cognitive impair- thinning of the part of the brain responsible for
ment in older adults over 50 (with an average age the formation of new memories. “This thinning
of roughly 68), according to a recent University of is usually a precursor to dementia,” notes Small.
California, San Francisco, study.
Myth: “Brain training” can help preserve
Reality: Other health conditions raise risk of your memory » You’ve probably heard of com-
dementia » High blood pressure, especially in puterized “brain training” games touted to help
middle age, is associated with a higher risk of de- older adults stave off cognitive impairment. But
mentia later in life, according to the American Heart a January 2018 article in the Journal of the Amer-
Association. The main reason for this is that un- ican Geriatrics Society was skeptical.“The prob-
treated hypertension narrows and blocks arteries lem with brain training is that they only work for
everywhere, including your brain. What’s more, re- the activity you’re being specifically trained for—
searchers have recently found that cholesterol trig- you may be able to recall your shopping list more
gers the formation of toxic clusters of amyloid-beta easily, but it won’t help you remember how to get
protein, a key player in the development of Alz- to the supermarket,” explains Small. Instead, he
heimer’s disease. Another condition, atrial fibrilla- advises learning a new language, taking a class
tion, or AFib, which is present in about 9% of people or even just reading the newspaper. People who
over the age of 65, has also been linked to demen- regularly participate in intellectual activities have
tia. If you have any of these conditions, it’s crucial a significantly lower risk of dementia, according
to get them under control. People with AFib who to a Chinese study published in JAMA Psychia-
take blood-thinning medications such as warfarin try in May 2018. Or become a do-gooder: seniors
cut their risk of dementia by nearly half, accord- who volunteer regularly have lower rates of de-
ing to a 2018 study in the European Heart Journal. mentia, according to a study published in 2017
It is equally important to get anxiety or depres- in PLOS One. □
54
tisol may “prune” the synapses in

your brain’s prefrontal cortex and
hippocampus, which are essen-
tial for certain brain functions,
including memory. “Stress levels
naturally elevate through the pro-
cess of aging,” Radley says. For
those who suffer from chronic
stress, it seems the cumulative
exposure to cortisol over a per-
son’s life span may actually erode
cognitive function.
In an age when people are
expected to multitask at work and
in their downtime, there are likely
some predictable consequences.
Behaviors such as bouncing
between email and texts or talking
on the phone while trying to cook
dinner can disrupt your brain’s
ability to store new memories,
warns David Meyer, a professor of
psychology and cognition at the
University of Michigan who has
studied the impacts of multitask-
ing on memory.
“When you’re multitasking,
that’s interfering with processes
that normally would be devoted
100% to doing the mental work
that moves info from short-term
memory into long-term memory,”
Meyer explains.
He mentions a well-known
experiment during which research-
ers observed the brain activ-
ity of people who were trying
to learn new information while
multitasking. Compared with a
group that was focused solely
Give You spaced on that lunch meeting
you said you’d attend, or you forgot on learning the new info, the
multitaskers had disruptions in
Your a promise you’d made to a friend
or that the glasses you are look- the parts of their brain that are
used for learning and memory
Brain a ing for are on the top of your head.
Minor memory lapses strike us all consolidation. On a follow-up
test, the multitaskers had higher
Break from time to time. But if your brain
seems increasingly unable to hold
on to new information, stress may
error rates than their single-focus
counterparts, Meyer says.
When stress starts to be to blame. Your brain needs small breaks
eat at your memory “There’s a lot of evidence to sug- after a task in order to lock away
gest chronic stress can lead to new memories. If you’re replying
BY MARKHAM HEID
memory impairments,” says Jason to emails while participating in a
Radley, an associate professor conference call or chatting with a
of brain sciences at the Univer- colleague, Meyer says, your over-
sity of Iowa. Radley’s research tasked mind just won’t have the
has shown that high or prolonged chance to store the new informa-
spikes in the stress hormone cor- tion it’s collecting.
55
Depression Smoking
A high-fat diet Hot flashes

8 UNEXPECTED
THINGS THAT
MESS WITH
YOUR MEMORY
Put down that doughnut. And that cigarette. And Xanax.
They all may be hurting your ability to remember
By Linda Melone
OU REGULARLY RANSACK THE HOUSE TO FIND YOUR Hot flashes

keys. You suddenly can’t recall the name of your kid’s Every time hot flashes make
teacher. You made your six-month dentist appoint- you feel like sticking your head
ment three months late. Sound familiar? Fear not: in the freezer, you may also feel
most forgetfulness isn’t anything serious, says neu- a fog rolling into your brain.
rologist and neuroscientist Majid Fotuhi, the medical “The more hot flashes a woman
director of NeuroGrow Brain Fitness Center and the author of Boost experiences during menopause,
Your Brain. Lack of sleep, certain medications and even stress may the worse her ability to remem-
be the culprit. Here are surprising things that impact your memory. ber names and stories,” says Fo-
tuhi. “Fortunately, hot flashes
shaped gland that sits along the don’t damage the brain in any
A dysfunctional front of your windpipe, the thy- way. Memory improves once
thyroid roid reigns over almost all your the hot flashes subside.” Other
When your thyroid’s out of body’s metabolic processes. menopause-related symptoms
whack, you may feel too hot, “People with high or low thy- contribute to memory loss, in-
too cold, anxious, depressed— roid levels—which are very cluding insomnia and sleep
and your memory may also be common in women—may have apnea, Fotuhi says.
lagging. “Although the thyroid difficulty with memory and
doesn’t have a specific role in concentration,” he says. Ask
the brain, memory loss is the your doctor for a simple thy- Depression
one thing a person notices roid test to determine if it’s the Mood disorders may also hinder
when it stops functioning nor- culprit behind your memory your memory, several studies
mally,” says Fotuhi. A butterfly- problems. show. “We don’t understand the
57
SCIENCE OF MEMORY BARRIERS TO MEMORY
B12 deficiency A dysfunctional thyroid
exact link, but strong evidence “This holds true earlier in life,
indicates depression and bipo- A high-fat diet too. Studies link childhood
lar disease disrupt the neural Greasy burgers and french fries obesity with a reduced atten-
circuitry involved in developing pack on pounds and are hard tion span and impaired concen-
and retrieving memories,” says on your heart—and they may tration and focus.”
Allen Towfigh, medical director also cause memory issues. One
of New York Neurology & Sleep study revealed that adolescent
Medicine. “The severity of the mice had poorer learning and Prescription drugs
memory loss often mirrors the memory skills after being fed Check your medicine cabi-
severity of the mood disorder— a high-fat diet for eight weeks, net: many common prescrip-
severe depression brings about while another study on middle- tion drugs can make you feel
equally severe memory loss.” aged rats found that the hippo- forgetful. Anxiety-disorder
Prolonged periods of every- campus (the part of the brain meds such as Xanax, Valium
day stress increase cortisol lev- responsible for short-term and Ativan (which are ben-
els in the brain, which causes memory) may be particularly zodiazepines) put a damper
our brain cells to lose synapses vulnerable to the impact of on the part of the brain that
(the bridges that connect our high-fat diets. moves events from short-term
brain cells) and makes it more More research is needed to to long-term memory. Tricyclic
difficult to create and retrieve determine for sure whether antidepressants have a simi-
memories. The good news is high-fat diets impact human lar effect. Heart medicines in-
that when memory loss exists memory, but here’s what we do cluding statins and beta block-
with a mood disorder, it is usu- know: Calorically dense diets ers have also been linked to
ally at least partially reversible. promote type 2 diabetes, hy- memory issues, as have nar-
“As the individual’s mood im- pertension and cardiovascular cotic painkillers, incontinence
proves, often so does the mem- disease, which can all do dam- drugs, sleep aids and even an-
ory loss,” says Towfigh. age to our brains, says Towfigh. tihistamines like Benadryl.
58
Prescription drugs Germs
Bottom line: don’t stop taking tive test. Although there is no cious anemia or gastrointesti-
your (potentially lifesaving) vaccine for the cold-sore virus, nal disorders like celiac disease
medications, but talk to your childhood vaccinations against or Crohn’s disease may also
doctor if you believe any drug other viruses could help pre- need supplements.
you are on may be affecting vent problems later in life, the
your memory. researchers suggest.
Smoking
If you’re still smoking, that may
Germs A vitamin B12 help explain memory lapses.
A nasty cold sore does more deficiency “Smoking damages the brain
than make you feel self- Vegetarians and vegans are at a by impairing its blood supply,”
conscious—it may be messing higher risk of being deficient in says Towfigh. Research pub-
with your memory, according vitamin B12, which keeps the lished in the Archives of General
to a 2013 study in Neurology. body’s nerve and blood cells Psychiatry gathered from data
Researchers found that people healthy and helps make DNA. obtained from more than 7,000
who were exposed to many That’s because B12 occurs nat- people found a more rapid de-
germs, such as herpes simplex urally only in animal foods. In cline in smokers’ brain function
type 1 (the cold-sore virus), addition to fatigue, a B12 defi- (which included vocabulary
over their lifetimes were more ciency can also lead to memory and other brain functions) with
likely to have memory prob- problems. If you are concerned age than in those who never
lems than those exposed to your meatless diet is affecting smoked. “Furthermore, ciga-
fewer germs. Among more than your memory, ask your doctor rette smoking promotes the
1,600 study participants, those for a blood test to determine if accumulation of abnormal pro-
with a higher “infectious bur- you need supplemental B12. teins which impair the brain’s
den” had a 25% increase in the Pregnant women, older ability to process and relay in-
risk of a low score on a cogni- adults and anyone with perni- formation,” says Towfigh. □
59
3
Memory
Now
Buffeted by the internet,
stress and insomnia, modern
life can feel like an endless
round of The Interruption
Game. How is it affecting
our recall abilities?
60
THE
DIGITAL-ERA
BRAIN
Critics complain the internet is eroding our memory.
Supporters say it is opening pathways. Who is right?
By J.I. Baker
REVOLUTIONARY NEW TECH- But is the internet really corrupting our mem-
nology was promising unprec- ories—or will our skeptical experts, like Socrates
edented access to information before them, eventually be proven wrong? After
but was also sounding alarms: all, the brain’s attention system and preferences
“This invention will produce for novel experiences existed long before the digi-
forgetfulness in the minds of tal age, and our ability to remember is nearly inex-
those who learn to use it, be- haustible—with about a million gigabytes of men-
cause they will not practice their memory,” warned tal storage capacity. “Your brain—every brain—is a
a leading mind of the era. It was 370 B.C., and the work in progress,” said Michael Merzenich, a neuro-
speaker was Socrates. The object of his scorn? The scientist and brain-plasticity researcher. “It is ‘plas-
dreaded written word. tic.’ From the day we’re born to the day we die, it
It was only the beginning of millennia of hand- continuously revises and remodels, improving or
wringing over technology and memory. In the slowly declining, as a function of how we use it.”
1400s, the invention of the printing press prompted Though we don’t know exactly how memories are
concern that monks would become lazy without all created or retrieved, we know that neurons talk to
that copying to do. In the 18th century, the bogey- one another through synapses, which function sort
man was the newspaper, which French statesman of like bridges. Information crosses those bridges
Malesherbes argued isolated readers. Now, several with the help of chemicals called “neurotransmit-
centuries later, the internet is memory’s latest al- ters.” The more neurotransmitters we have and the
leged enemy, with psychologists, neurobiologists more frequent their signals, the stronger the con-
and educators warning that our recall and atten- nections between neurons become—until the pro-
tion spans are being decimated. The digital us, the cess begins to happen even without the help of neu-
concern goes, is distracted and superficial, on the rotransmitters. This leads to the formation of strong
road to intellectual ruin. memories, but it only works when our brains are ac-
63
SCIENCE OF MEMORY THE INTERNET’S EFFECT
tively engaged. In short, the brain is like a muscle— good workout for the brain, but today we Google in-
the more you use it, the better it functions. stead—more than 5.5 billion times daily, compared
But our brains don’t work well when we’re dis- with 3.3 billion times per day in 2012, according to
tracted, which we are more than ever these days. A the most recent estimates. As a result, our atten-
2016 joint study by MIT and Microsoft found that tion spans have shrunk from 12 seconds in 2000
the average employee checks their email 11 times to eight seconds—one second less than a goldfish’s.
an hour. Another survey, of college students from This leads to what scientists call digital amnesia:
26 states, revealed that students spend 20% of their we tend to forget information if we think it can be
class time texting, playing games and checking so- retrieved from a digital device.
cial media on digital devices. By constantly inter- Consider a 2018 study published in the Journal
rupting our thought processes, we are interfering of Experimental Social Psychology. Researchers in-
with our ability to form both short- and long-term structed 129 subjects to take self-guided tours of the
memories, experts say. Stanford Memorial Church on the Stanford Univer-
Even the fact that many of our online “con- sity campus. Participants were supposed to take
versations”—instant messaging on Facebook, for note of details such as “the cruciform shape of the
instance—remain unfinished affects our brains’ abil- church.” Some had camera phones and were told to
ity to function. This phenomenon take pictures so they could post
is sometimes called “the Waiter images on Facebook, while others
Effect,” since studies have shown toured without cameras. A week
that waiters tend to remember in- In one study, later, the tourers were given a quiz
complete business with custom- about what they had seen and
ers better than visits that end nor-
a group of learned. Those without a camera
mally. “Social interactions are students said got seven out of 10 questions right
very demanding for the brain,” they spent 20% on average, while those who had a
says Eric Fransén, who studies camera got six right. “It could just
memory at Stockholm’s Royal In-
of class time be that we’re using these devices,
stitute of Technology, “and social texting, playing distracting ourselves from the ex-
media is designed to enable inter- games and perience, and because of that dis-
actions with basically unlimited traction, we don’t remember the
numbers of people.” The mental checking social thing we’re supposed to be pay-
juggling involved in switching media. ing attention to,” Emma Temple-
back and forth between platforms ton, a Dartmouth psychological
and conversations slows down researcher who was a co-author
our brains—sometimes for up to of the study, told Vox.
half an hour after a switch of topic, Fransén says. But the internet may be changing merely what
The contemporary onslaught of information af- we remember, not our capacity to do so, suggests
fects our ability to remember too. Though our brains Columbia University psychology professor and re-
are designed to seek new data, too much of it may searcher Betsy Sparrow. In 2011, Sparrow led a study
be causing this evolutionary instinct to run amok. in which participants were asked to record 40 fac-
The compulsion to constantly consume information toids in a computer (“an ostrich’s eye is bigger than
means we often check Instagram when we should be its brain,” for example). Half of the participants
doing what Fransén calls “memory housekeeping” were told the information would be erased, while
by giving our brains some downtime. “My great- the other half were told it would be saved. Guess
est concern today concerns our use of social media what? The latter group made no effort to recall the
at time points of the day when our brains need to information when quizzed on it later, because they
rest,” notes Fransén. “The pauses that once occurred knew they could find it on their computers. In the
whenever we weren’t explicitly focused and active same study, a group was asked to remember both the
now often get filled with social media.” information and the folders it was stored in. They
Another issue: the passive nature of obtaining didn’t remember the information, but they remem-
information online. Trying to actively recall data is a bered how to find the folders. In other words, human
64
Fans videoed the pop band the Vamps during

a performance at Cardiff University in Wales.
memory is not deteriorating but “adapting to new gists Christopher Chabris and Daniel J. Simons in a
communications technology,” Sparrow says. 2010 Los Angeles Times op-ed. And surfing the web
In a very practical way, the internet is becom- exercised the brain more than reading did among
ing an external hard drive for our memories, a pro- computer-savvy older adults in a 2008 study in-
cess known as “cognitive offloading.” Traditionally, volving 24 participants at the Semel Institute for
this role was fulfilled by data banks, libraries and Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the Univer-
other humans. Your father may never remember sity of California.
birthdays because your mother does, for instance. In How Google Is Changing Your Brain, Har-
Some worry that this is having a destructive effect vard psychologists Daniel M. Wegner and Adrian
on society, but Sparrow sees an upside. Perhaps, F. Ward argue that not needing to remember facts
she suggests, the trend will change our approach might free our minds to focus on more ambitious
to learning from a focus on individual facts and endeavors and could even help us fix some of the
memorization to an emphasis on more conceptual messes we’ve created. “There may be costs asso-
thinking—something that is not available on the in- ciated with our increased reliance on the inter-
ternet. “I personally have never seen all that much net, but I’d have to imagine that overall the ben-
intellectual value in memorizing things,” Sparrow efits are going to outweigh those costs,” observes
says, adding that we haven’t lost our ability to do it. Benjamin Storm, a psychology professor with the
Still other experts say it’s too soon to understand memory lab at the University of California, Santa
how the internet affects our brains. There is no ex- Cruz. “It seems pretty clear that memory is chang-
perimental evidence showing that it interferes with ing, but is it changing for the better? At this point,
our ability to focus, for instance, wrote psycholo- we don’t know.” □
65
The North German championships

of Memory XL, a learning and
memory competition
BATTLE OF THE
BIG BRAINS
On a lark, an American journalist with average recall
decided to train for the USA Memory Championship.
His first stop? A cutthroat match in Oxford, England,
to observe the world’s top “mental athletes”
By Joshua Foer
AVING BEGUN TO FUTZ AROUND

with memory techniques, I didn’t
yet have any sense of the true
scope of the enterprise I was em-
barking upon. I still thought of
my project as a harmlessly ca-
sual experiment. All I wanted to
know was whether I really could improve my mem-
ory, and, if so, by how much. I certainly hadn’t se-
riously considered the challenge by self-help guru
and memory impresario Tony Buzan to try to com-
pete in the USA Memory Championship. After all,
there were more than three dozen American mental
athletes who trained each year for the event. There
was no reason to think a journalist who occasionally
forgets his own Social Security number could com-
pete against the U.S.’s top memory geeks.
Americans on the international memory cir-
cuit in 2018 are a different breed than they were in
2011, when I published Moonwalking with Einstein,
an account of my year of memory training. Today
the reigning three-time world memory champ is an
American who got into mental athletics after read-
ing my book. But back then, Americans mentalists
were like Jamaicans on the bobsledding circuit—
easily the most laid-back folks, and possibly even
the most stylish, but on the international stage, be-
hind the curve in both technique and training.
67
SCIENCE OF MEMORY MEMORY COMPETITIONS
Nobody in North America took memory sport a gold belt buckle embossed with his initials, a gold
seriously enough to stop drinking three months be- chain over his tight white T-shirt, and black sailor
forehand, like the eight-time world memory champ, pants. Gunther informed me that in college he was a
Briton Dominic O’Brien, used to do, and from the photo model for Nissan cars, and depending on how
looks of it, few competitors engaged in the rigor- you squinted, he looked like the villain in a James
ous physical-training regimen that Buzan recom- Bond movie or an aging figure skater. He was in ter-
mended. (One of his first, unsolicited pieces of ad- rific physical shape, and was, I would soon learn, a
vice to me was to get in shape.) fierce competitor. He was carrying around with him
In those days, U.S. records paled in comparison a locked, shiny metal suitcase filled with between
to the Europeans, and though America had run its 20 and 30 decks of playing cards, which he planned
memory championship for as long as any country in to memorize. He wouldn’t tell me the exact number
the world, the best American memorizer had only for fear it would get back to Ben Pridmore.
finished in the top five of the world championship Unlike the U.S. championship of the era, which
once, in 1999. Perhaps it said something about our had just five events, none lasting longer than 15 min-
national character at the time that America had pro- utes, the World Memory Championships, held at
duced none of the world’s best competitive memo- Oxford University, was often referred to as a “men-
rizers—that we were not as detail-obsessed as the tal decathlon.” Its 10 events, called “disciplines,”
Germans, as punctilious as the Brits or as driven spanned three grueling days, and each tested the
as the Malaysians. Or maybe, as one European so- competitors’ memories in a slightly different way.
berly suggested to me, Americans have impover- Contestants had to memorize a previously unpub-
ished memories because we are preoccupied with lished poem spanning several pages, pages of ran-
the future, while folks on the other side of the At- dom words (record: 280 in 15 minutes), lists of bi-
lantic are more concerned with the past. Whatever nary digits (record: 4,140 in 30 minutes), shuffled
the reason, it became clear that if I wanted to learn decks of playing cards, a list of historical dates, and
more about the art of memory—if I wanted to study names and faces. Some disciplines, called “speed
with the best—I was going to have to go to Europe. events,” tested how much the contestants could
memorize in five minutes (record: 405 digits). Two
THE GRANDDADDY OF events on the yearlong inter- marathon disciplines tested how many card decks
national memory circuit, the World Memory Cham- and random digits they could memorize in an hour
pionship, was going to be held in Oxford, England, (records: 2,080 digits and 27 decks).
at the end of the summer. I decided I needed to go The first World Memory Championship was
and called up Ed Cooke, a young grand master from held at the posh Athenaeum Club in London in
the U.K. I had met at the U.S. competition, to ask if I 1991. “I thought, this is insane,” recalled Buzan,
could crash at his place. Oxford was his home turf— who founded the event. “We have crossword cham-
where he’d grown up, gone to college, and now lived pionships. We have Scrabble championships. We
with his parents on their country estate located on have chess, bridge, poker, draughts, canasta and
the town’s outskirts, in a 17th-century stone house Go championships. We have science fair champi-
called the Mill Farm. I arrived a few days early and onships. And for the biggest, the most fundamental
got the lay of the land. of all human cognitive processes, memory, there’s
The favorite to take the title from the reigning no championship.” He also knew that the idea of a
world champ, the Brit Ben Pridmore, was Dr. Gun- “world memory champion” would be an irresistible
ther Karsten, the balding, angular 43-year-old god- draw for the media, and a savvy way to promote his
father of German memory sport, who had won books on mind training.
every German national contest since 1998. Gun- With the help of his friend Raymond Keene, a
ther showed up wearing what I learned was his British chess grand master, Buzan sent out letters
standard uniform: an imposing pair of black ear- to a handful of people who he knew were involved
muffs and metallic sunglasses whose insides had in memory training, and also ran an ad in the Times.
been completely taped over except for two small Seven people showed up, including a psychiatric
pinholes. “Extraneous stimuli,” as Gunther called nurse named Creighton Carvello who had memo-
them, are the memorizer’s bête noire. He also wore rized the telephone number of every Smith in the
68
In ancient times, mnemonic aids were

crucial to transmitting stories, such as
Homer’s tale of Helen of Troy.
Middlesbrough phone book and another person in 1998, the poem has been written by Buzan him-
named Bruce Balmer who had set a record for mem- self. The 108-line free-verse offering of the year I
orizing 2,000 foreign words in a single day. Several attended was titled “Miserare,” and came from a
of the competitors wore tuxedoes. collection titled “Requiem for Ted.” It began:
Today, contestants no longer adhere to such With most things in the Universe I am happy:
a strict dress code, but everything else about the Supernovas
championship has gotten far more serious. What The Horse Head Nebula The Crab
began as a one-day contest has now expanded to The light-years-big clouds That are the Womb of
fill an entire weekend. Of all the disciplines in a Stars
three-day memory decathlon, the first one of the It went on to list the many things Tony Buzan
first day, the poem, is the most universally dreaded. was happy about, including “God’s freezing balls,”
For years, Gunther had lobbied to have the event and ended:
stricken from the contest, but poetry is where I am not happy That Ted
memorization began, and to cut it from the cham- Is Dead.
pionship because a few of the competitors find it The competitors had 15 minutes to memorize as
difficult would run counter to the competition’s un- many lines as possible, and then a half hour to write
derlying premise that memorization is a creative, them on a blank sheet of paper. In order to receive
humanizing endeavor. So every year, a new, previ- full credit for a line, it had to be rendered perfectly,
ously unpublished poem is commissioned for the down to each capital letter and punctuation mark.
world championship. For the first few years of the Competitors who failed to underscore just how “not
competition, in the early ’90s, the poem was written happy” the author was or who mistakenly thought
by British poet laureate Ted Hughes, whom Buzan that Ted was “dead” without a capital D would get
describes as “an old friend.” Since Hughes’s death only half the total points for that line.
69
SCIENCE OF MEMORY MEMORY COMPETITIONS
The question of how best to memorize a piece notes Neisser, “there is a sense in which he was alto-
of text, or a speech, has vexed mnemonists for mil- gether right.” John Dean may have gotten the details
lennia. The earliest memory treatises described two wrong, but he got the important stuff right. We all
types of recollection: memoria rerum and memo- do the same thing when we try to recount conver-
ria verborum, memory for things and memory for sations, because without special training our mem-
words. When approaching a text or a speech, one ories tend to only pay attention to the big picture.
could try to remember the gist, or one could try to It makes sense that our brains would work like
remember verbatim. that. The brain is a costly organ. Though it accounts
Cicero preferred the point by point, not word by for only 2% of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of
word, approach, and employing memoria rerum. In all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quar-
his dialogue, De Oratore, the Roman statesman sug- ter of all our glucose gets burned. It has been ruth-
gests that an orator delivering a speech should make lessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at
one image for each major topic he wants to cover, the tasks for which it evolved. One might say that
and place each of those images at a locus. Indeed, the whole point of our nervous system is to develop
the word “topic” comes from the Greek word topos, a sense of what is happening in the present and what
or place. (The phrase “in the first place” is a vestige will happen in the future, so that we can respond
from the art of memory.) Perfect in the best possible way. In the
recall of words is something our most reductive sense, our brains
brains simply aren’t very good are fundamentally prediction
at, a fact famously illustrated Though the brain and planning machines. And
in the congressional Watergate to work efficiently, they have to
hearings of 1973. In his testi- accounts for find order in the chaos of possi-
mony before the Senate Wa- only 2% of the ble memories. Much of the dis-
tergate Investigating Commit- body’s mass, it array that our brains filter out is
tee, President Richard Nixon’s words, because more often than
counsel John Dean reported on uses up a fifth of not, the actual language is just
the contents of dozens of meet- all the oxygen window dressing. What matters
ings related to the cover-up of is the res, the meaning of those
the break-in. To the president’s
we breathe and words. And that’s what our
chagrin and the committee’s de- burns a quarter brains are so good at remember-
light, Dean was able to repeat of our glucose. ing. In real life, it’s rare that any-
verbatim many conversations one is asked to recall ad verbum
that had taken place in the Oval outside of congressional depo-
Office. His recollections were sitions and the poetry event at
so detailed and seemingly so precise that report- a memory competition.
ers took to calling him “the human tape recorder.” Ultimately, Gunther ended up losing the poetry
At the time, it hadn’t yet been revealed that there event to a 15-year-old Austrian, Corinna Draschl,
had been an actual tape recorder in the Oval Office and losing the championship as well. The top prize
recording the conversations that Dean had recon- went to one of his protégés, a quiet and intensely
structed from memory. focused 18-year-old Bavarian law student named
While the rest of the country took note of the po- Clemens Mayer. After botching the spoken numbers
litical implications of those tape recordings, the psy- and names-and-faces events, Ben Pridmore landed
chologist Ulric Neisser saw them as a valuable data in fourth place overall, lowered the brim of his black
trove. Neisser compared the transcripts of the re- hat and walked out the door alone, vowing that he
cordings with Dean’s testimony, and analyzed what would begin preparing the next day to reclaim his
Dean’s memory got right and wrong. Not only did title one year hence.
Dean misremember specific quotes—that is to say, Ed fared even worse. Of the three dozen com-
verborum—he often didn’t properly remember the petitors, he was one of only 11 who failed to mem-
gist of what had been discussed—rerum. But even orize an entire deck of cards in either of the two
when his memories were wrong in isolated episodes, speed cards trials, which is like a placekicker miss-
70
Briton Andi Bell prepared to

memorize a deck of cards during the
World Memory Championships.
ing an extra point twice in a row. I ran after him comparatively leaden one. People used to labor to
and grabbed him to ask what had happened. “Too furnish their minds. They invested in the acquisi-
much ambition” was all he would say, shaking his tion of memories the same way we invest in the ac-
head. “I’ll see you back at the house.” He walked quisition of things. But today, beyond the Oxford
across the Magdalen Bridge to go find a pub where examination hall’s oaken doors, the vast majority
he could watch some cricket and drink Guinness of us don’t trust our memories. We find shortcuts
until he’d forgotten his failure. to avoid relying on them. We complain about them
Standing at the front of the Oxford examination endlessly, and see even their smallest lapses as evi-
hall, watching the competitors scratch their heads dence that they’re starting to fail us entirely. How
and twiddle their pens as they struggled to recall did memory, once so essential, end up so marginal-
“Miserare,” I felt acutely aware of how odd it was ized? Why did these techniques disappear? How, I
that we’d come to this: that the only place left where wondered, did our culture end up forgetting how
the ancient art of memory was being practiced, or to remember?
at least celebrated, was in this rarefied competition.
Here in one of the world’s most storied centers of Adapted from Moonwalking with Einstein
learning were the last vestiges of a glorious Golden by Joshua Foer, published by Penguin Press,
Age of Memory. an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group,
It is hard not to feel as though a devolution has a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
taken place between that shining era and our own Copyright © 2011 by Joshua Foer.
71
WHY SLEEPING
ON IT IS KEY
FOR MEMORY
While you are getting your
shut-eye, your brain is deciding
which new information to keep
and which to discard
By Patrick Rogers
“To sleep, perchance to dream.”
HAKESPEARE, OF COURSE, WAS

describing the ultimate slumber,
death, in those famous words
from Hamlet, and the phrase,
with its soothing cadence, evokes
the common notion of sleep as
an escape from worldly toil. Yet
recent theories of sleep show that the cells of the
sleeping brain are not at rest but surprisingly ac-
tive, conducting nightly rituals such as shrinking to
allow fluid to rinse away toxins and auditing levels
of hormones, enzymes and proteins. Meanwhile,
the brain’s metronome, just above the bridge of the
nose, is making itself heard far into the organ, syn-
chronizing neural activity in near-perfect harmony.
“During the day, the brain is using energy re-
sources to fire neurons,” Allan Pack, director of
the Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology
at the University of Pennsylvania, told TIME, but
“at night, a switch turns on so the sleeping brain
can take advantage of the metabolic downtime to
do some cleaning up.”
Scientists have long known that the time spent
sleeping is ideal for sorting through the torrent of
72
73
SCIENCE OF MEMORY THE NEED FOR SLEEP
A PET scan of
the brain during
REM and NREM
sleep. Color
coding shows red
areas as the most
active through to
dormant blue.
information taken in during waking hours. By mak- ries are ferried to deep storage in the brain’s cortex.
ing value judgments about what will prove useful But scientists now believe that a night of rest can
later, the brain consolidates bits of information do much more than help with simple recall. In his
during sleep, the tastes, smells, thoughts and emo- laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley,
tions of daily experience, to produce memories neuroscientist and psychologist Matthew Walker,
that are worth holding on to. Without these sleep- author of the 2017 best seller Why We Sleep: Unlock-
enhanced memories, learning, language, complex ing the Power of Sleep and Dreams, has developed an
motor skills, decision-making and a slew of friends- elegant theory that answers one of the key questions
and-family interactions would be a long, tough slog. in sleep research: Why do we cycle through differ-
Consider the foundational gestures of social in- ent modes of sleeping each night? Walker suggests
tercourse—greetings. In a recent study in Boston, a that slow-wave sleep, as well as REM or “dream
group of people were shown head shots and names sleep,” have distinctly beneficial impacts on mem-
of 20 strangers and told they would be asked to iden- ory formation and processing. They allow us to up-
tify each subject 12 hours later. “The idea was to re- date our neural circuits at night and efficiently man-
create the kind of cocktail-party scenario where you age the finite storage capacity of the brain.
meet a lot of people at once and then run into one
of them the next day,” says researcher Jeanne Duffy, REM TAKES ITS name from the rapid eye move-
a neuroscientist in the Division of Sleep and Circa- ments that characterize the phase. In a typical
dian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a sleep cycle, REM is followed by a descent into the
teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. deeper unconsciousness of non-REM, or NREM,
Only half of the subjects were given a chance to sleep. Eventually we end up in the state of slow-
sleep, and when it came time to identify the photos, wave sleep, when brain waves slow to one tenth of
those participants proved an average of 12% more ac- typical daytime frequency, before starting the cycle
curate at matching a name to a face than the sleepless over again. Each cycle lasts about 90 minutes.
cohort. They were also more confident of their ability There’s no consensus as to why we lurch between
to say hello to the proper person the next day. The stages of sleep in a pattern that, on paper, looks like
theory goes that during the quiet and unperturbed a cross section of a jagged mountain range, and any-
hours of sleep, the memory-making hippocampus, a thing but restful. But Walker argues that these con-
seahorse-shaped lobe housed deep in the brain, was volutions of the mind are steps in the building of
better able to bind individual bits of data into paired resilient memories. In one experiment, Walker and
neural connections along which long-term memo- his colleagues exposed a group of volunteers to new
74
information, then monitored their brain waves as

they nodded off into naps. As the volunteers entered
stage 2 NREM sleep (still a light sleep), the research-
ers witnessed tiny bursts of electricity called sleep
spindles traveling between the hippocampus and the
brain’s cortex. A transfer of information was taking
place: the brain was clearing the shelves of its frag-
The Big Pink:
ile short-term memory banks while moving the most A Soothing
important information to stabler long-term storage.
The more sleep spindles the volunteers experienced Sound That
during their nap, the greater the restoration of their
learning when they woke up. The result was a thor-
Helps Sleep
ough weeding out of the day’s earlier lessons that left
plenty of room to take in new information.
and Memory
Even more surprising were the researchers’ find- It’s not as well known as white
ings about REM. They asked volunteers to view 150 noise but more effective for zzzs
disturbing images two times, separated by a period BY AMANDA MACMILLAN
of 12 hours. Half of those who slept in the interim
were noticeably less stressed out by the images when Deep sleep is critical to maintaining a robust
they viewed them for the second time versus those memory, but both decline with age. A recent
who hadn’t slept. Researchers monitoring their study in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
brain waves found decreased electrical activity in suggests that one easy way for older adults
the amygdala, a region of the brain that processes to get deeper sleep and stronger memories
is to listen to “pink noise”—a soothing mix of
emotions, during their REM sleep, when levels of
frequencies known for being more natural than
the stress-inducing chemical norepinephrine also the more famous “white noise.”
drop. In other words, the brain at rest found ways From previous studies, researchers knew that
to calm the emotions that adhered to the photos the playing pink noise during sleep improved the
day before, making the memory of them more man- memory of younger adults, but Northwestern
ageable. “We sleep to remember and we sleep to for- University medical school’s Phyllis Zee wanted
get,” Walker says. “I call it overnight therapy.” to see if the same applied to older people, who
tend to get less slow-wave sleep and are at
Just as sleep can take the sting out of painful
greater risk for memory impairment.
memories by allowing us to move beyond them, Zee and her team had 13 adults ages 60
the opposite may also be true, adds Walker. A lack and older spend two evenings in a sleep lab.
of REM sleep may condemn us to reliving an old Participants took a memory test at night, went
trauma as if it were new. “The more nights you to sleep wearing headphones and an electrode
sleep, the more soothing the influence of sleep on cap and repeated the memory test in the
that memory,” he said. morning.
On one night, participants were played a
Indeed, other researchers have recently shown
series of short bursts of pink noise during
that less than five hours of repose at night can lead deep sleep. The sounds were timed to match
to forming false memories, and psychologists in San participants’ slow-wave oscillations. No noise
Francisco have uncovered a connection between was played during the other night.
learning a physical skill by day and increased ac- After analyzing everyone’s sleep waves,
tivity in the motor cortex, the brain’s center for ex- Zee’s team found that people’s slow-
ecuting movements, during certain stages of sleep. wave oscillations increased on the nights
Perhaps Shakespeare’s moony Hamlet sought punctuated by pink noise. Come morning,
people who had listened to it performed three
only oblivion at the end of the day, but the poet’s
times better on memory tests than they had
fiendish Macbeth knew what he was talking about the other night. One of the study authors has
when he contemplated sleep after murdering a since co-founded a company that plans to
rival: “balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second market pink noise commercially. But first, says
course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.” □ Zee, larger and longer studies are needed.
75
OUT OF
MIND
What do we stand to lose—and gain—
when we wipe out a memory?
By David Bjerklie
A
DISTRAUGHT 23-YEAR-OLD
walks into a clinic and pleads
with the receptionist: “I’ve
got to have a memory erased!”
Would you approve of such a
procedure? Most people’s gut re-
action would probably be along
the lines of, “Well, it depends.” If that 23-year-old
was crippled by fear because he had been brutally
assaulted, for example, or paralyzed by PTSD be-
cause she had survived an ambush in which fellow
soldiers were captured and executed, then perhaps
so. On the other hand, it’s easy to imagine scenarios
in which erasing a memory would seem unneces-
sary, misguided or even frivolous.
To be able to erase memory is as unsettling a
prospect as it is riveting. No wonder it’s been a
sci-fi plot staple for at least half a century. But now,
it appears, researchers may actually be on the cusp
of making memory manipulation a reality. The po-
tential applications understandably are getting a
lot of attention, as is the question of whether or not
people will want to override their memories. But
there are also a range of concerns that should give
Survivors of the Bataclan attacks in

Paris were evacuated by bus. Some
were treated by Montreal psychiatrist
Alain Brunet, who has been testing
the effectiveness of propranolol in
dampening traumatic memories.
77
SCIENCE OF MEMORY ERASING MEMORIES
us pause, cautions Arthur Caplan, a medical ethi- in the brain that plays a critical role in mediating
cist at New York University’s School of Medicine. the interaction of emotions and memory. Brunet
“I think people are looking at memory alteration in had been testing propranolol in small trials but had
ways that trivialize it. My message is that it should the opportunity to bring the nascent treatment to
be taken seriously.” a larger venue in November 2015, when terrorists
A growing body of research suggests that mem- killed 130 people in an attack on the Bataclan the-
ories are reactivated each time we bring them to ater and surrounding neighborhoods in Paris. “I
mind, not retrieved whole, like we might pull some- went to offer my help,” says Brunet, who eventually
thing from a file drawer. The act of memory is an act trained 200 clinicians and treated 320 individuals
of reassembly. Although the analogy is imperfect, traumatized in the attack, and in the process they
imagine that at the cellular level, where memories learned how they might begin to “create a model
exist as connections and paths, we are refreshing a of treatment.” Propranolol is especially promising,
neuronal GPS using the latest information. says Brunet, because “it’s cheap, it’s safe, we know
The process is called memory reconsolidation, its side effects, we know who we can give it to and
when a window briefly opens and a memory can be who we shouldn’t give it to. It’s very close to ideal.”
updated with new information. It is during recon- Brunet is quick to explain that the treatment
solidation, for example, that the does not wipe out memories.
emotionally charged memories That isn’t possible yet, nor is
triggered by PTSD flashbacks that the intent. “We are tak-
can be softened. The challenge “I think people ing the pathological sting out
is to trigger the memory—to ask of the memory.” The patient
the soldier, for example, to recall
are looking still remembers the event, but
the details of the ambush—and at memory in a way that fades with time.
to then intervene to diminish alteration “They might still find it sad.
the emotional reaction to that But it’s like when you think of
specific memory. Think of it as
in ways that an old girlfriend, an ex. You can
tweaking the GPS to generate a trivialize it,” still think about it, but you are
new and less stressful route. says an ethicist. no longer in the terrible grip of
Scientists first learned ways to the memory.”
override a simple memory they “It should be And it isn’t just PTSD that
intentionally created in mice, taken seriously.” Brunet thinks can be effectively
using an electric shock every treated with propranolol. Many
time the animals heard a partic- mental states fueled by highly
ular sound. Researchers then ex- emotional memories could po-
plored ways to achieve something similar in human tentially benefit, including depression, substance
subjects. There is now a range of other experimen- abuse, certain phobias, anxiety and adjustment dis-
tal interventions aimed at interrupting memory re- orders, pathological mourning or, yes, even runaway
consolidation. There are drugs that inhibit certain obsession over romantic betrayal. This is not a magic
receptors or the synthesis of certain proteins; there bullet, of course. Just as we now know there isn’t a
are drugs that lower the levels of the stress hormone single memory system, we also know there is no sin-
cortisol; there are techniques such as electroconvul- gle experience of trauma. There are traumatic events
sive therapy and deep brain stimulation; there are that happen once, and traumas such as sexual abuse
also behavioral approaches, including ones based on and domestic violence that happen repeatedly, over
neurofeedback techniques or subliminal exposure. the course of years. Trauma can be part of the envi-
Alain Brunet, a professor of psychiatry at McGill ronment in cases of poverty or racism.
University in Montreal, uses propranolol, a drug “We know very little about these complicated sit-
used to treat high blood pressure by blocking the ac- uations in terms of what goes on in the brain,” says
tion of the stress hormone epinephrine. It turns out New York University researcher Joseph LeDoux,
that propranolol also blocks the action of epineph- who studies the connection between memory and
rine in the amygdala, the almond-shaped structure emotion, particularly fear and anxiety. What we do
78
At a neuroimaging center in
France, researchers monitored
cerebral activity. Below, veteran
Cliff Drake was cured of PTSD
at Brainsake, a biofeedback
center in Maryland.
SCIENCE OF MEMORY ERASING MEMORIES
Vietnam vet Ned Broderick in his

Chicago art studio. He was treated with
propranolol to deal with war memories.
know, though, is that the consequences of such ex- the promise that we can create that self through our
periences and environments can lead to PTSD that own volition.” And while “choosing helps us create
is more complex in terms of time frame and vol- our lives,” we also know that most of us are less than
ume of memories. It is unclear whether trauma of perfectly skillful choosers.
these varieties will ever be amenable to reconsoli- To choose to erase—or even dampen—a memory
dation treatment. “Theoretically you could break would be a big decision for most of us. University
down complex trauma stimuli into various trigger of California, Irvine, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus
components individually targeted for intervention,” and colleagues devised an experiment that aimed to
says LeDoux, “and kind of chip away at it until the look at the factors that might enter into our choice.
patient is comfortable in some sense.” They asked nearly 1,000 study participants (half
The basic question, however, remains. Will peo- from New Zealand and half from the U.S.) to read
ple actually want to rewrite their memories, and, if one of two scenarios in which the participant was
so, under what circumstances? There are good rea- asked to imagine being either a restaurant manager
sons to expect that people would at least want the who was stabbed and robbed of money in a vicious
choice. We love choice. Perhaps too much, as Co- assault, or a soldier on a peacekeeping mission in
lumbia University researcher Sheena Iyengar points Afghanistan who was stabbed and robbed of sup-
out in her book The Art of Choosing: “Choice gives plies in a vicious assault. With that exception, the
us permission to imagine a better self, and it holds wording of the scenarios was the same. Participants
80
also read a statement about the risk of developing part of who we are and how we grow?, they asked.
PTSD. Some subjects read that scientific studies But what may have appeared like mindwipe in ex-
had established the risk to be 4%, some read that periments with rats, however, is in reality far more
the risk was 40%, and still others read a statement subtle in humans.
in which the risk was not quantified. Although current therapies for interrupting re-
Subjects were then asked if they felt they should consolidation can change only the emotional mag-
be given the choice to take a memory-dampening nitude of memories, not their factual content, re-
drug. It turned out that just over half of the subjects searchers acknowledge that, yes, someday memory
believed in having the choice to take the drug and elimination might be possible. Which makes it easy—
only about a fifth said they would actually take it. and perhaps necessary—to project our concerns
The researchers were surprised the numbers were into worst-case scenarios. We need to recognize,
so low. Perhaps people are just generally optimistic says Caplan, “that this isn’t just about things that
that they could surmount such a trauma? Or maybe give us nightmares. Eliminating memory might be
the trauma wasn’t dire enough? Or perhaps they something the individual wants but won’t be so great
were uncomfortable about tinkering with memory? for society. Memory plays a crucial role in our legal
system. Do we say you can wipe out that memory,
WHILE IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to say if but not until we bring it to trial?
and when these drugs and tech- Memory is part of how we hold
niques will be widely available, people accountable.” And even if
we have a pretty good idea of “Eliminating our ability to modify memories
what the debate over their use is confined to smoothing their
will look like. “The first concern
memory might jagged emotional edges, Caplan
will be the risk of intervening in be something the is still concerned. “Anger, fury,
the brain when we don’t fully individual wants indignation, crying, remorse—
understand how memories are all of this stuff counts in court.”
formed,” says Caplan, the medi-
but won’t be so It also counts in our lives. What
cal ethicist at NYU. “The second great for society. happens to our personal narra-
will be issues of access and cost.” Memory plays tive, our sense of self, if we strip
Which, in turn, will lead to is- out the emotion attached to the
sues of fairness and geography. a crucial role in bad stuff?
“People may think it’s great to our legal system.” There will undoubtedly be
have memory therapy in the U.S. trade-offs, for individuals as
and Europe, but what about the well as societies. But with any
people in the Democratic Re- of these concerns, says LeDoux,
public of Congo who have been through mass rape it’s a mistake to consider—let alone dismiss—the
and barbaric civil war? Do we care? Does it matter? concept as a single thing. What we have to do, says
Will we pay for it?” LeDoux, is ask: “What happens in this kind of situ-
It is the more abstract concerns, however, that ation with this kind of patient, and what exactly are
generate the most attention. LeDoux remembers we trying to treat or change, and is that possible?”
the pushback to a key paper from his lab that, when The machinery of memory we rely on has
it was published in 2000, demonstrated how a evolved because it is efficient. Walt Whitman’s “I
drug could seemingly eliminate a memory in rats. contain multitudes” is an apt description of our in-
“George Bush’s bioethics panel put out a statement, terlocking memories and the systems in which they
basically saying that memory is sacrosanct, that reside. Rewriting our memories, forging and for-
you can’t be messing with memory in people,” says getting them, even intentionally, is something we
LeDoux. “But every human interaction involves do on our own. That’s not to shrug our shoulders
messing with memory. Every therapeutic exchange about the prospects of pills or procedures to en-
also does.” The alarm raised by ethicists was trig- hance those processes, but rather to try to address
gered by the specter of people blithely popping pills and more fully understand what it is that we lose—
to forget their traumas. Isn’t trauma an important and gain—when we change a memory. □
81
82
4
a Better
Memory
Mark Twain invented a game to improve
his memory. Andy Warhol wore cologne.
You can try everything from sleep to
drawing to chewing gum.
TRAIN
YOUR
BRAIN
Understanding how recall works
is the job of neuroscience, but there
are plenty of tricks, foods and
exercises that may help to protect
your memory from decline
NE OF OUR GREATEST FEARS IS

losing our memory to a disease
such as Alzheimer’s, but there
are ways to not only sharpen the
recall we have but also potentially
ward off the illness. It starts, per-
haps unsurprisingly, with diet.
Some research suggests foods rich in vitamin E and
leafy greens could have a role in lowering the risk of
the disease. To preserve memory, exercise is a no-
brainer, but there are surprising strategies as well,
including drawing information rather than writing
down words, chewing gum and associating quirky
images with material to be remembered.
84
H E LLO
MY NAM
E IS
SCIENCE OF MEMORY TRAINING YOUR BRAIN
DARK GREEN
LEAFY
VEGETABLES
Kale, collard greens,
spinach and broccoli are
good sources of vitamin E
and folate, says Martha
Clare Morris, director of the
section on nutrition and
nutritional epidemiology in
the Department of Internal
Medicine at Rush University
in Chicago. Exactly how
folate may protect the brain
is unclear, but it may be
by lowering levels of the
amino acid homocysteine,
which has been linked to
an increased risk for heart
disease and may trigger
the death of nerve cells in
the brain.
When we are between the ages of 30 and 34, we can identify

about 83% of faces, a percentage that slides to 75% at age 70.
—DARTMOUTH COLLEGE AND HARVARD UNIVERSITY STUDY
The Unforgiving 100

Forgetting Curve Review 1 Review 2 Review 3
Curve of Forgetting 90
80
The forgetting curve, which shows
70
Remembered %
how quickly we forget information, is

60
steepest in the first 24 hours after we 50
learn something. Just how much then 40
evaporates into thin air varies from 30
person to person, but unless you review 20
the material, you’ll forget most of the new 10
information after the first day. The rest
will slip away gradually. Class 10 min. 24 hrs. 1 wk. 1 mo.
86
SIX-
MINUTE TEST
In one Friends episode, the group
tries to name all 50 states in six
minutes. Joey reaches 56 but then
concedes South Oregon isn’t a state,
bringing him to 55. Can you beat him?
Memory may be imperfect, but a recent

study suggests an unusual strategy
As long ago as 1973, boost recall. to either consolidate of processing. But in

investigators were Enter psychologist or vanish. In one trial, one trial, the subjects
exploring the memory- Jeffrey D. Wammes. subjects were given four were required to list
boosting advantage A few years ago, he seconds to write down the characteristics
of dual-coding—how
dual coding how ran a series of trials as many of the objects of an object, which
thinking about an built around some as they could, but in went pretty deep too.
object and drawing a easy-to-draw objects, the rest they got 40 Another theory had
picture of it can make such as a balloon or seconds, along with a been that drawing
us remember it better. a fork. After viewing variety of instructions. simply takes longer, but
Research showed that the items flash up on No matter how many the four-second trial
the strategy worked, but a screen, participants variations of the test the appeared to debunk
the studies were flawed, were told to either researchers ran, drawing that. For now, Wammes
failing to account for draw the item or write beat every other option, only concludes that
important questions, its name. They then every time. Just why drawing encourages
such as if writing a word performed an unrelated isn’t clear. One theory the integration of
in a time-consuming way, task (identifying tones) had been that drawing various aspects of a
like calligraphy, would to allow the memories requires a deeper level memory trace.
87
LIST YOUR
TOP 10
MEMORIES
1. _ _ _ ___ ______ _
2. _ _ _ _ ________ _
3. _ _ _ _ ______ __
Odds ar
4. _ _ _ ____ ___ will be froe, most
m
teens or your
when we 20s,
5. _ _ _ _ __ ____ t
things fo r y big
rt
first time he
.
6. _ _ _ __ _____ __
7. _ _ _ __ _______ _
8. _ _ _ _ ________ _
AVOCADOS
9. _ __ _ _ _______ _ This creamy treat is a rich source of the antioxidant
vitamin E, which some researchers suggest is associated
10. _ _ ____ _____ _ with a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s.
“If I’ve been wearing one perfume for three months, I force
myself to give it up . . . so whenever I smell it again it will always
remind me of those three months.”
—ANDY WARHOL
Fetal Recall
Experiments have shown that fetuses as young as
30 weeks can remember what they hear, supporting
stories by mothers that their newborns calm down
at certain sounds. Scientists even think that prenatal
memory is key in an infant developing an attachment
to his or her mother. One study looked at babies
whose mothers had watched a popular soap opera
while pregnant and found that the infants calmed
down when the show’s theme music played.
88
689904897521
Need to Memorize a Long Number?
Memory champ Chester Santos suggests breaking it into clusters of three and associating a word
with each group. For the number above, it could be: 689 (lightbulb); 904 (tissue); 897 (camera); 521
(octopus). Think of a tiny lightbulb. You wrap it in tissue; Madonna appears and takes a picture. She
trips, drops the camera in the ocean, and an octopus grabs it. Read the sentences a few times; recite the
words in parentheses. When you see “lightbulb,” you’ll think of 698; “tissue” will prompt 904, and so on.
Visualize.
Visualize.
Visualize.
Not convinced that
visualization helps your
memory? A Harvard
study found that people
who visualized playing
the piano turned on
the same part of the
brain as those who
actually practiced the
piano. The finding
suggests that mentally
practicing, say, a golf
swing could lead to
mastery with less
physical practice, and
more profoundly, that
mental training changes
the physical structure
of the brain.
89
Memory Power:
The Best Time to Exercise
Move it or lose it. people who exercised later or no exercise. Two associated with memory
That’s the message immediately after or who days later, the people retrieval. Although the
from a study published did not work out at all. returned to see what study was too small to
in the journal Current Seventy-two subjects they remembered and prove that four hours
Biology, in which participated in a picture- to have their brains is the magic number
researchers found that location task for about scanned. Those who linking exercise and
people who exercised 40 minutes. They were exercised hours later remembering, you might
four hours after a either assigned 35 had better recall and consider a workout
memory task retained minutes of exercise right more clear activation in as part of an overall
information better than away, exercise four hours the areas of their brain memory strategy.
FISH
Salmon, mackerel, tuna and
other fish are rich in heart-healthy
omega-3 fatty acids, including
docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which
“seems to be very important for
the normal functioning of neurons,”
Martha Clare Morris says. Plus, if
you are eating fish more often, that
means eating less red meat and
other forms of protein that are high
in artery-clogging saturated fats.
90
PEANUTS AND PEANUT BUTTER

Peanuts and peanut butter are both high in fat, but
it tends to be the healthy kind; plus, they are packed
with vitamin E and may help keep the brain healthy
and functioning properly. Other good choices are
almonds and hazelnuts. “There has been some very
good research that diets that are high in healthy fats,
low in saturated fat and trans fats, and rich in whole
grains, green leafy vegetables and nuts are good for
the brain,” says Maria C. Carrillo, senior director of
medical and scientific relations at the Chicago-based
Alzheimer’s Association.
“I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it /

But I probably will / Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture . . . /
Boring stories of glory days.”
—BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
LOCK IN THE GRID

Test your visual short-term memory. Make a copy of
the images below and set it aside. Then color in one or
two of the squares in each grid. Close the magazine and
try to replicate the pattern on your copy. See if you can
improve your score.
The Binge
Factor
TV binge-watchers forget
contents more quickly than
people who watch an episode
a week, according to a study
from Australia. Right after
watching a show, bingers
scored high on a contents
quiz, but after 140 days, they
scored lower than viewers
who watched the same show
weekly. Bingers also said
they enjoyed the show less
than the once-a-weekers.
91
WHOLE
GRAINS
Fiber-rich whole grains
are an integral part of the
Mediterranean diet, which
is also loaded with fruits,
vegetables, nuts and
seeds, olive oil and wine.
Research out of Columbia
University Medical Center
in New York City shows
that this diet may be linked
to lower risk of the mild
cognitive impairment that
can progress to Alzheimer’s
disease. “We don’t eat foods
or nutrients in isolation;
we eat in combination with
other foods, so there is
value in dietary patterns,”
says Nikolaos Scarmeas,
an associate professor
of neurology at Columbia
University, who conducted
the studies. This type of diet
may reduce inflammation,
oxidative stress and other
vascular risk factors such
as high blood pressure—all
of which may have a role in
increasing risk for brain and
heart diseases.
Ace the Cocktail- H E LLO

MY NAM
Party Circuit E IS
When you meet someone, pay attention to their name

and repeat it in conversation. Hello, Robert, nice to meet
you, Robert. Where are you from, Robert? Come up with
a mental association, like a famous person with the
same name. Say, Robert Downey Jr. Or picture a hapless
bank robber covered in burrs. In your mind, ask what
the person’s name is again. And then one more time.
92
nailed the assignment.

Mark Twain’s You can try it, too. Think
of a place you know well,
Unlikely Board Game such as your house, and
visualize locations in
Remembering British monarchs an order, like front door,
hallway, den. Assign each
You might know Mark and Clara Clemens, who and planted stakes monarch to a location.
Twain as the author of were unsuccessfully where the monarchs’ To recall the reign of
Huckleberry Finn, but trying to learn the rule started. Twain William I, think of a whale
the memory-challenged reigns of the English may not have known it, floating at your front door.
writer was also the monarchs. Twain but his system was a The whale is the biggest
inventor of “Mark thought if he could help variation on the ancient fish, just as William was
Twain’s Memory Builder: the girls see the dates, loci method used by the most important king.
A Game for Acquiring they would succeed. He rhetoric students in For Henry II, think of a hen
and Retaining All Sorts went out to the driveway Greece and Rome, which in the hallway; Richard
of Facts and Dates.” and measured out organizes images in the Lionhearted, as a lion
The project started with 817 feet—each foot locations. Before long, roaring in the living room;
Twain’s daughters, Susy represented a year— Susy and Clara had and so on.
BERRIES
The average The latest research presented
at the National Meeting of the
native English- American Chemical Society in
speaking Boston found that blueberries,
strawberries and acai berries
American knows may help put the brakes on
about 42,000 age-related cognitive decline
words by age 20 by preserving the brain’s
natural “housekeeper”
and around mechanism, which wanes
48,000 words with age. This mechanism
by age 60. helps get rid of toxic proteins
associated with age-related
—GHENT UNIVERSITY STUDY memory loss.
93
6 Funny Things You Can Radvansky had college students

perform memory tasks while
Do to Remember crossing a room and exiting

a doorway. What he found in
three different settings was
Drawings of aliens. Chewing gum. Oddball type fonts. that students forgot more after
If you need to jog your memory, try some of these walking through a doorway
unconventional tricks versus moving the same
distance across a room. His
conclusion? The doorway or
Science. Almost a quarter of “event boundary” hurts your
customers who received the alien ability to retrieve thoughts made
flyer remembered to use their in a different room.
coupons, while just 17% with the
plain flyer did.
SMELL THE ROSEMARY:

Roasting potatoes, meat or other
edibles with rosemary is a sure
way to kick the flavor up a notch,
but it turns out that the smell
CHEW GUM: Your dentist might of rosemary can also help you
not like it, but if you need to remember complex events and
remember a piece of information tasks. In some tests, people
for about half an hour, pop in a who sniffed essential oil from
piece of gum (sugarless is OK). the herb had a 75% better recall USE A FUNNY FONT: The right
Research has shown that people than participants who didn’t. typeface, or font, can make
are better able to remember Rosemary has also been shown all the difference in a reading
visual and audio memory tasks if to help alertness and arithmetic. experience. You want the words
they simultaneously chew gum. to be legible and easy to read,
It keeps you more focused and whether it’s in a book or on
improves concentration. the internet. But if you want to
remember what you’re reading,
DRAW AN ALIEN: One old- you might want to switch it up,
fashioned way to remember a choosing the weirdest, most
simple task—returning your challenging font possible (but not
library book, feeding your bold or oversize fonts that make
turtle—was to tie a red string you think the words are easier).
around your finger. But if you use When something is unfamiliar and
something more distinctive, you difficult to read, you are forced to
might have a better success rate. concentrate on it more, allowing
To prove the point, a research you to remember it more easily.
team from Harvard University and STAY PUT: Have you ever walked
the University of Pennsylvania through a doorway and couldn’t EAT SOUR PATCH DOLLS AND
stationed assistants outside remember why, or what you were OTHER ODD FLAVORS: While
a coffee shop with two sets of looking for? You’re not alone. It learning a complex point for
materials to distribute. One set turns out that the simple act of an exam, eat something with a
invited customers to show a plain passing from one room to another distinctive taste, such as a sour
flyer and attached coupon to get can make you go blank. The candy. When you taste the same
a dollar off their next purchase. phenomenon is what University flavor again during the test, it
The other made the same offer, of Notre Dame psychology should help you remember the
with the difference that the flyer professor Gabriel Radvansky concept and its finer details.
featured a stuffed alien doll. The calls “event boundary.” In a study Make sure the professor will let
alien delivered, according to the published in the Quarterly Journal you take the candy into the test
study, published in Psychological of Experimental Psychology, with you.
94
Americans
got hooked on
memory games
Editor Edward Felsenthal during the
Creative Director D.W. Pine 15-year run of
THE SCIENCE Concentration,

hosted here by
OF MEMORY Hugh Downs.
Editorial Director Kostya Kennedy
Editor Eileen Daspin
Designer Patty Alvarez
Photo Editors Robert Conway, Rachel Hatch
Writers J.I. Baker, David Bjerklie, Joshua Foer, Markham
CREDITS M. Brown/Getty Images 33
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Copy Editor Joseph McCombs Vision/Getty Images (dog, com 36 Ed Kashi/VII/Redux
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95
LAST WORD
“God gave us memory so that we might

have roses in December.”
—J.M. BARRIE
96

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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.

Memories are often compared to

Chapter 1: Making Memories

Chapter 2: Why We Forget

Chapter 3: Memory Now

Chapter 4: Building a Better Memory

Parts of this edition appeared previously in TIME and Health.

Early humans had to

OR AN EXPERIMENT ON NAVIGATIONAL 300 million hours of television programming. The

Scientists believe groups of

SCIENCE OF MEMORY THE BIOLOGY OF MEMORY

Researchers at the University of Oxford

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Know Your Terms: color yellow, a banana

A Memory Glossary faster and more likely to

UNDERSTANDING lays down new tracks—forming and

SYSTEM The resulting memory is brief,

Memories and emotions are linked through 4 / OLFACTORY BULB

The 20th-century British

N THE SHADOW OF THE GRAND APART-

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Researchers at the European Centre for Taste Sciences

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The Power of a Madeleine

No sooner had the warm liquid, little crumb of madeleine which

When odors trigger strong

house upon the street, where

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Bottlenose dolphins have procedural

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SCIENCE OF MEMORY PERFECT RECALL

ture of an automobile accident,

Anxious to details you wouldn’t be other-

People chology professor at the University

May Have author of a 2018 study, published

Better memory. “That’s a plus if you’re try-

Recall In Fernandes’s study, 80 under-

’D LIKE TO SHARE AN EPISODE FROM MY

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For a trial of infants’ long-term memory,

SCIENCE OF MEMORY FORGETTING CHILDHOOD

Christmas ornament hadn’t yet mastered.

Meck, second from right,

SCIENCE OF MEMORY THE CURSE OF AMNESIA

Meck and her husband, Jim, in Texas, in

SCIENCE OF MEMORY THE CURSE OF AMNESIA

Meck, center, with, from left, daughter

In the new ﬁlm Welcome to Marwen, Steve

Former spy Jason Bourne awakes on a boat

A new convert to psychoanalysis, producer

3 / ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,

find misleading is the portrayal of memories

4 / THE VOW (2012)

An example of amnesia trivialized, with the twist

After sustaining a head injury in an attack that

6 / 50 FIRST DATES (2004)

7 / FINDING NEMO (2003)

When overprotective clownfish Marlin sets

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sion diagnosed and treated. Middle-aged individu-

Reality: Exercise can boost memory. » “It’s

tisol may “prune” the synapses in