Four suggestions to improve your memory

A memory could stay with a person for a lifetime, but its content might change, but one should not worry about forgetting the most beautiful moments of his/her life; the most vivid memories stay in memory for decades and there are many strategies to keep them fresh. By Jaan-Juhan Oidermaa. “People usually remember the most important events, such as graduation, wedding day or birth of a child, for their whole life. Of course, somewhere around being 60-70 years old, the episodic memory will slowly start deteriorating,” Dheeraj Roy, a brain scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, said. His speciality involves studying memory loss. Usually, it’s not the critical connections between various memories that are being forgotten, but their content. On the other hand, one should not be surprised as some less important memories can be forgotten in just a couple of years. Recall often and in detail So why do some memories stay with us longer? “One of the main factors is repetition – if we want to remember something, it’s a good idea to think about it later,” Jaan Aru, an Estonian brain scientist, and researcher at the University of Tartu, said. Memories deemed worthy of remembering should be recalled scrupulously and often. According to Roy, it would not hurt to flick through the photo album occasionally, for example. The “Mind Palace”, popularised in the TV show “Sherlock”, has some actual scientific ground to it as well. One could visualise driving to the childhood home, using different routes, and “leave” specific memories in various places. Structuring memories in such a manner helps recall them more elaborately. “When it comes to remembering, the associations linked to circumstances being memorised are really important. Our brain is not like a card index, with every file separate, but rather […]

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