Category: Memory

Long-term memory can be boosted with the easiest method you can imagine.

Simply reading something out loud is the easiest way to boost your long-term memory, research finds.

The action of speaking something out loud and hearing yourself say it helps boost long-term memory.

Psychologists call this ‘the production effect’: we remember things better when we read them out loud than when we read silently to ourselves.

Professor Colin M. MacLeod, who co-authored the study, said:

“This study confirms that learning and memory benefit from active involvement.

When we add an active measure or a production element to a word, that word becomes more distinct in long-term memory, and hence more memorable.”

How to boost long term memory

The study compared various different ways of learning written information and how to boost long term memory:

1. reading silently,
2. hearing someone else read it,
3. listening to a recording of oneself,
4. reading aloud in real time.

Reading aloud in real-time emerged as the most effective method.

The study’s authors explain that:

“…production is memorable in part because it includes a distinctive, self-referential component.

This may well underlie why rehearsal is so valuable in learning and remembering: We do it ourselves, and we do it in our own voice.

When it comes time to recover the information, we can use this distinctive component to help us to remember.”

Professor MacLeod said:

“When we consider the practical applications of this research, I think of seniors who are advised to do puzzles and crosswords to help strengthen their memory.

This study suggests that the idea of action or activity also improves memory.

And we know that regular exercise and movement are also strong building blocks for a good memory.”

The study’s authors conclude:

“Production is a simple but versatile learning strategy.

[…]

Mouthing, writing, and typing words all have also been revealed to be memory-enhancing productions, and there is evidence that drawing pictures also helps.”

The study was published in the journal Memory (Forrin et al., 2017).

Emotional events cause neurotransmitters to flood the brain, which affects what we remember.

Emotional experiences can lead to ’emotional hangovers’, research finds.

These ’emotional hangovers’ are still measurable in the brain after the emotional event has finished.

Emotional hangovers can also strongly influence our memory for subsequent events.

Dr Lila Davachi, one of the study’s authors explains:

“How we remember events is not just a consequence of the external world we experience, but is also strongly influenced by our internal states — and these internal states can persist and color future experiences.”

When people have an emotional experience, their memory becomes stronger for non-emotional events that happen afterwards.

In other words, our brain stays on high alert even if subsequent events are not that exciting.

For example, after seeing a particularly emotional movie, we might have a heightened memory for a relatively everyday experience like driving home.

Dr Davachi continued:

” ‘Emotion’ is a state of mind.

These findings make clear that our cognition is highly influenced by preceding experiences and, specifically, that emotional brain states can persist for long periods of time.”

For the research people were shown a series of images, some of which were emotionally arousing.

Brain scans revealed that after viewing arousing images, the brain continues to be in a heightened state of arousal for around 20 to 30 minutes.

The study also found that emotional events release a cocktail of neurotransmitters into the brain.

Dr Davachi said:

“We see that memory for non-emotional experiences is better if they are encountered after an emotional event.”

Previous studies tell us that emotional hangovers also work the other way: like getting the headache before you have a drink.

Emotional events can change our memory for previous events as well, colouring them in different ways.

The study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience (Tambini et al., 2016).

A familiar beverage that may help protect the brain from aging.

Orange juice is linked to a 47 percent reduced risk of memory problems with age, a study finds.

People drinking orange juice had a better memory for things like shopping lists and found it easier to follow group conversations, researchers found.

Red vegetables, leafy greens and berry fruits may also help to reduce the risk of memory loss.

The study included 27,842 men who were followed over two decades.

They were asked about their food intake and given tests of thinking and memory at four-yearly intervals.

Questions they were asked included:

• “Do you have more trouble than usual following a group conversation or a plot in a TV program due to your memory?”
• “Do you have more trouble than usual remembering a short list of items, such as a shopping list?”

The results showed that those consuming six servings of fruit and vegetables per day were at a 34 percent lower risk of worse thinking skills with age.

Orange juice, meanwhile, was linked to a 47 percent reduced risk.

Eating healthily in midlife emerged as particularly healthy.

Dr Changzheng Yuan, study co-author, said:

“One of the most important factors in this study is that we were able to research and track such a large group of men over a 20-year period of time, allowing for very telling results.

Our studies provide further evidence dietary choices can be important to maintain your brain health.”

The study only shows an association, and does not prove that orange juice causes the reduction in risk.

The study was published in the journal Neurology (Yuan et al., 2018).

People who still have an extraordinary memory at 80 reveal how we can all age gracefully.

Warm and trusting social relationships could be the key to having an extraordinary memory when you are 80.

The conclusion comes from research on so-called ‘superagers’ — people who have the cognitive abilities of those up to 30 years younger.

The decline in superager’s memory and other cognitive skills is much slower than their peers, leading to them having extraordinary memories.

They also report having more high-quality and satisfying relationships with other people.

Dr Emily Rogalski, a study author, said:

“You don’t have the be the life of the party, but this study supports the theory that maintaining strong social networks seems to be linked to slower cognitive decline.”

Research on people with an extraordinary memory

The superagers — all over 80 years of age — were asked about six major aspects of psychological well-being:

• their autonomy,
• positive relations with others,
• environmental mastery,
• personal growth,
• purpose in life,
• and self-acceptance.

The real difference between superagers and their peers was in the category of social relations with others.

Ms Amanda Cook, the study’s first author, said:

“This finding is particularly exciting as a step toward understanding what factors underlie the preservation of cognitive ability in advanced age, particularly those that may be modifiable.”

Dr Rogalski said:

“It’s not as simple as saying if you have a strong social network, you’ll never get Alzheimer’s disease.

But if there is a list of healthy choices one can make, such as eating a certain diet and not smoking, maintaining strong social networks may be an important one on that list.

None of these things by themselves guarantees you don’t get the disease, but they may still have health benefits.”

The study on people with an extraordinary memory is part of the Northwestern University SuperAging Program.

The study’s authors explain its aims:

“SuperAgers are adults over age 80 whose performance on tests of episodic memory, the type of memory that shows decline with aging and dramatic decline in Alzheimer’s dementia, is at least as good as individuals 20 to 30 years their junior.

The SuperAging Program is dedicated to identifying factors that contribute to their elite memory performance.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Maher et al., 2017).

Neuroscientists reveal how the brain stores memories and information and which part of the brain stores memories.

Imagine you had a tiny device inside your brain that could ‘see’ the moment a new memory was formed.

What would it record?

Since the brain is made up of neurons linked together in a vast network, it seems reasonable to suppose that some part of that network would activate when you, say, saw your first child being born.

But how big a network?

Is that memory contained in a handful of neurons or is it distributed widely across the network?

Fascinating clues come from a study of nine patients who had had electrodes implanted in their brains to help monitor their seizures (Wixted et al., 2014).

These electrodes can monitor the activity of single neurons in the brain.

With their permission, neuroscientists took advantage of this window into the electrical activity of the brain to examine how memories are laid down and recalled.

How does the brain store memories?

For the test, participants simply learned a series of words, then were presented with another list which contained some words they’d learned along with some new ones.

They were asked to say which ones they’d seen before.

The results amazed the study’s first author John T. Wixted:

“Intuitively, one might expect to find that any neuron that responds to one item from the list would also respond to the other items from the list, but our results did not look anything like that.

The amazing thing about these counterintuitive findings is that they could not be more in line with what influential neurocomputational theorists long ago predicted must be true.”

Part of the brain where memories are stored

As expected, the memory was encoded in the hippocampus, an area of the brain that is vital for memory.

What they saw was that the memory for a single word was encoded across hundreds of thousands of neurons in a distributed network.

While this may sound like a lot, it’s actually only a small fraction: the number of neurons firing in response to a single word was about 2 percent of those in the hippocampus.

So, if you could look inside your own brain when a new memory is formed, what you’d see is that a relatively small network of neurons in the hippocampus jumps into action.

When you recall a memory, that same network leaps into action again.

The study’s authors explain:

“[This is]…a sparse distributed coding scheme in which each memory is coded by the activity of a small proportion of hippocampal neurons, and each neuron contributes to the representation of only a few memories.” (Wixted et al., 2014).

The most efficient way to store memories

Some have theorised that this is the most efficient way for the brain to work because:

• If memories were localised to individual neurons then they could easily be lost if those particular neurons died.
• If memories were too widely spread across the network, memories would be too easily overwritten or confused.

One of the study’s authors, Dr. Peter N. Steinmetz commented:

“To really understand how the brain represents memory, we must understand how memory is represented by the fundamental computational units of the brain — single neurons — and their networks.

“Knowing the mechanism of memory storage and retrieval is a critical step in understanding how to better treat the dementing illnesses affecting our growing elderly population.”

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Stress affects memory negatively through the action of cortisol, the stress hormone.

A link between the stress hormone cortisol and short-term memory problems has been found by research.

Although cortisol is a natural hormone that spikes when we are stressed to help us deal with challenging situations, over time its long-term effects may be detrimental to short-term memory.

This is the first study to link long-term exposure to cortisol with short-term memory problems.

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Iowa and published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that high levels of cortisol were associated with a loss of synapses in the prefrontal cortex, a structure that’s important for short-term memory (Anderson et al., 2014).

Study of how stress affects memory

The findings are based on a study of rats which were 21 months old — this meant their brains were roughly equivalent to that of a 65-year-old human.

In the study, rats’ corticosterone levels were measured.

They were then given a T-shaped maze to run through which required them to remember which direction the treats were.

Some of the rats forgot which direction to turn after a short delay — just as human short-term memory decays over a few minutes — but those with higher levels of corticosterone were more likely to forget.

Rats with low levels of corticosterone got the direction right 80% of the time, while those with high levels of corticosterone only got it right 58 percent of the time.

When their brains were examined, it turned out that the stressed and forgetful rats had 20 percent fewer synapses in their prefrontal cortex, suggesting this was the cause of the short-term memory loss.

When the older rats were compared with younger ones, the older ones with low levels of the stress hormone performed just as well as the younger ones.

The same could not be said of those with higher levels of the stress hormone.

This study may help to explain why some people’s memory declines so dramatically with age, while others remains relatively unaffected.

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Eyewitness to a crime remembered twice as many details using this technique that can jog your memory.

Closing your eyes really can help jog the memory, a study finds.

The results should be useful for helping eyewitnesses to crimes remember more details when questioned by police.

The study, published in the journal Legal and Criminological Psychology, had participants watching an electrician entering a property, doing some work and stealing various items (Nash et al., 2015).

Afterwards, some were asked questions with their eyes open and others with their eyes closed.

The psychologists were also interested to see if building rapport before asking the questions made any difference.

Memory jogged

The results revealed that closing the eyes gave the biggest boost to recall, but establishing some rapport before questioning was also beneficial.

People who had their eyes open and did not have some rapport with questioner only got 41 percent of the questions right.

People with their eyes closed and who had some rapport got 75 percent of the questions right.

Dr Robert Nash, who led the study, said:

“It is clear from our research that closing the eyes and building rapport help with witness recall.

Although closing your eyes to remember seems to work whether or not rapport has been built beforehand, our results show that building rapport makes witnesses more at ease with closing their eyes.

That in itself is vital if we are to encourage witnesses to use this helpful technique during interviews.”

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Improve your memory, concentration, power and retention by using these 14 science-backed techniques to increase cognitive function.

Many of the usual methods for how to improve memory are well-known, such as using imagery, chunking and the forbidding sounding ‘brain training’.

The problem with most of these methods is they involve a fair amount of mental effort.

So, here are 14 mostly easy ways to improve memory that are backed up by psychological research, many requiring relatively little effort.

Few of these methods for how to improve memory require you to train hard, spend any money or take illegal drugs.

All free, all pretty easy, all natural!

1. A good mood improves memory

Something as simple as getting a bag of candy is enough to improve memory and concentration, research finds.

In fact, anything that quickly puts you in a good mood can improve memory and decision-making.

Professor Ellen Peters, who co-authored the study, said:

“There has been lots of research showing that younger adults are more creative and cognitively flexible when they are in a good mood.

But because of the cognitive declines that come with aging, we weren’t sure that a good mood would be able to help older adults.

So these results are good news.”

2. 40 seconds rehearsal boosts memory

Rehearsing a memory for just 40 seconds could be the key to permanent recall, a study finds.

When rehearsing a memory, the same area of the brain is activated as when laying it down, psychologists found.

Dr Chris Bird, who led the research, said:

“We know that recent memories are susceptible to being lost until a period of consolidation has elapsed.

In this study we have shown that a brief period of rehearsal has a huge effect on our ability to remember complex, lifelike events over periods of 1-2 weeks.

3. Associations improve memory

‘Reminders by association’ are a great tool to help improve memory for something in the future, research demonstrates.

Here are a few examples of ‘reminders by association’:

• A picture of your family by your desk reminds you to call them and tell them you will be late home.
• A piece of litter on the floor reminds you to put the bins out.

Little environmental cues like this were enough to double the number of people who remembered to perform some future action.

4. The aroma of rosemary improves memory

The aroma of rosemary essential oil can improve memory, concentration and the ability to remember future events, research finds.

For the study 66 people took various memory tests either in a room that was scented with rosemary or without.

Those breathing the scent of rosemary performed better.

5. How to improve memory: write about your problems

To do complex tasks we rely on our ‘working memory’.

This is our ability to shuttle information in and out of consciousness and manipulate it.

A more efficient working memory contributes to better learning, planning, reasoning and concentration.

One way to improve working memory capacity indirectly is through expressive writing.

You sit down for 20 minutes a few times a month and write about something traumatic that has happened to you.

Yogo and Fujihara (2008) found that it improved working memory after 5 weeks.

Psychologists aren’t exactly sure why this works, but it does have a measurable effect.

6. Vegetables linked to better memory

Eating vegetables — but not fruit — helps improve memory, research finds.

The study of 3,718 people over 65 living in Chicago asked how often people ate particular foods and administered cognitive tests.

Professor Martha Clare Morris, who led the study, explained the results:

“Compared to people who consumed less than one serving of vegetables a day, people who ate at least 2.8 servings of vegetables a day saw their rate of cognitive change slow by roughly 40 percent.

This decrease is equivalent to about 5 years of younger age.”

Green leafy vegetables showed the strongest association with an improved memory — they are also likely to help concentration.

Older people in the study got the greatest benefit from eating more vegetables.

7. Natural scenes improve memory

Nature has a magical effect on us.

It’s something we’ve always known, but psychologists are only just getting around to measuring it.

One of nature’s beneficial effects an easy way for how to improve memory and concentration.

In one study people who walked around an arboretum did 20 percent better on a memory test than those who went for a walk around busy streets.

In fact you don’t even need to leave the house.

Although the effects aren’t as powerful, you can just look at pictures of nature and that also has a beneficial effect (I describe this study in detail here).

8. Say words aloud to improve memory

This is surely the easiest of all method for how to improve memory: if you want to remember something in particular from a load of other things, just say it out loud.

A study (described here) found memory improvements of 10 percent for words said out loud, or even just mouthed: a relatively small gain, but at a tiny cost.

9. Drink hot chocolate

Two cups of hot chocolate a day could help keep the brain healthy, a study finds.

The research involved 60 people whose average age was 73.

They were given tests of memory, concentration, thinking skills and the blood flow in their brains was measured.

People who had impaired blood flow in the brain improved after drinking the flavanol-rich cocoa.

10. Meditation improves memory and concentration

Meditation has been consistently found to improve cognitive functioning, including memory.

But meditation takes time doesn’t it?

Long, hard hours of practice?

Well, maybe not.

In one recent study, participants who meditated for 4 sessions of only 20 minutes, once a day, were able to improve memory, concentration and brain function (the study is described here, also see my beginner’s guide to mindfulness meditation).

11. Exercise improves memory

Long-term memory is improved by exercise four hours after learning, a study finds.

Exercising directly after learning, though, does not improve memory at all.

In addition, brain scans revealed that exercise lead to more precise representations of memories in the hippocampus.

The scientists are not sure yet why exercise after learning improves memory.

However, they write:

“Considering that the exercise intervention took place after learning, delayed exercise most likely affected memory retention through an impact on memory consolidation.”

12. Predict your memory performance

Simply asking ourselves whether or not we’ll remember something is an unusual method for how to improve memory.

This works for both recalling things that have happened in the past and trying to remember to do things in the future.

When Meier et al., (2011) tested people’s prospective memory (remembering to do something in the future), they found that trying to predict performance improves memory.

On some tasks people’s performance increased by almost 50 percent.

13. Use your body to improve memory encoding

We don’t just think with our minds, we also use our bodies.

For example, research has shown that we understand language better if it’s accompanied by gestures.

We can also use gestures to encode memories.

Researchers trying to teach Japanese verbs to English speakers found that gesturing while learning helped improve memory (Kelly et al., 2009).

Participants who used hand gestures which suggested the word were able to recall almost twice as many Japanese words a week later.

14. Use your body to improve memory recall

Since our bodies are important in encoding a memory, they can also help improve memory recall.

Psychologists have found that we recall past episodes better when we are in the same mood or our body is in the same position (Dijkstra et al., 2007).

This works to a remarkably abstract degree.

In one study by Cassasanto and Dijkstra (2010), participants were better able to retrieve positive memories when they moved marbles upwards and negative memories when they moved marbles downwards.

This seems to be because we associate up with happy and down with sad.

Exercise and memory training

If all these methods seem a bit lazy, then you can always put in a bit more effort.

Probably the best way of improving your overall cognitive health is exercise.

Studies regularly find that increasing aerobic fitness is particularly good for executive function and working memory (check out this previous article on which cognitive enhancers work).

Conversely, stay in bed all the time and your working memory gets worse (Lipnicki et al., 2009).

Take your memory training to the limit and an incredible study by Ericsson et al. (1980) shows what can be achieved.

Our typical short-term memory span is about 7 things.

In other words we can hold around seven things in mind at the same time.

These researchers, though, increased one person’s memory span to 79 digits after 230 hours of practice, mostly using mnemonic systems.

Shows what you can do if you put in the hours.

That said, I’ll be sticking to a nice walk around the park.

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