ESSENTIAL TIPS for Memory Maintenance

We forget things for all sorts of reasons stress, distraction, lack of sleep. Go from brain blips to gleaming gray matter with this expert advice.

- LISA BAIN AND MARISA COHEN

Oh, how familiar this experience is: You put down your phone and a few minutes later you're looking for it everywhere...in the kitchen, in your purse. Did I leave it in the car? You might even start to panic and wonder whether this is the first hint of a decline that will cascade into dementia or Alzheimer's disease. Take a deep breath: Not every misplaced phone is cause for concern. There are tips and tricks, as well as lifestyle changes, that can bolster your brainpower and strengthen your memory.

How Soon We Forget (and Why)

Knowing how memories are formed can clue you in as to why you retain some things and not others. “Our senses are exposed to a lot of information, emotions and language over the course of a day,” says Lisa Genova, Ph.D., a neuroscientist and the author of the best-selling Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting. “But the brain is not a video camera, recording everything. To make a memory, your brain takes in what you perceive and pay attention to and translates that into neurological language.” It weaves what you experience into a pattern of associated connections, which is then stabilized as a neural circuit.

This neural circuit, Genova says, connects parts of the brain that are in charge of different sensory and emotional processes, “like, I saw, heard and felt this about something. So now those three are connected and become a single thing that can be perceived as a memory.” Tomorrow or 30 years from now, to retrieve that memory, “we need to be able to reactivate that neural circuit. That is the experience of remembering," she explains.