These are just some notes, and then some specific quotes.
You must pay attention to create a memory. If you were there and something happened but your attention was elsewhere, no memory was created to remember. In the moment most things are lost unless something memorable happens. (“...We learn to ignore what is familiar and of no consequence. We can’t remember what we ignore. Remembering requires that we give the thing to be remembered our attention.” p. 80 ¶2)
The hippocampus is where new and long term memories are stored. The prefrontal cortex is where present moment is remembered.
Working memory - whatever is held in your consciousness right now in the present moment. It’s short-lived, holding space in the prefrontal cortex for sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and language.
Declarative memories = things I know. Sometimes must work to recall them.
3 kinds of long-term memory
- semantic memory - for information
- episodic memory - for what happened
- muscle memory - for how to do things (ride a bike, play a piece on the piano, etc.)
Muscle memory (brain not muscle) –- a sequence of events bound together by the basal ganglia -- is the ability to perform a previously learned skill
Semantic memory -- what you know not attached to any person, what or where, or any specific experience; information; the history of you remembered by you (beginning on p. 78)
Episodic memory - attached to what and where: personal and always about the past
Memory - consolidating and retrieving what you’ve learned. Quiz yourself about what you learn (semantic memories)..
Quotes
“Regular use of these tools — repetition, spaced learning, self-testing, meaning, and visual and spatial imagery — will no doubt strengthen your semantic memory.” p. 75 ¶1
“Why do we retain so few memories for what happened when we were young? The development of language in our brains corresponds with our ability to consolidate, store, and retrieve episodic memories. We need the anatomical structures and circuitry of language to tell the story of what happened, to organize the details of our experiences into a coherent narrative that can then be revisited and shared later. So as adults, we only have access to memories of what happened when we owned the language skills to describe them.” p. 86-87
“Your episodic memories are chock-full of distortions, additions, omissions, elaborations, confabulations, and other errors. Basically, your memories for what happened are wrong...." (p. 99 ¶1)
“For every step in memory processing—encoding, consolidation, storage, and retrieval—your memory for what happened is vulnerable to editing and inaccuracies. To begin with, we can only introduce into the memory creation process what we notice and pay attention to in the first place. Since we can’t notice everything in every moment that unfolds before us, we only encode and later remember certain slices of what happened. These slices will contain only the details that were seduced by our biases and captured our interest. So my memory for what happened last Christmas morning will be different from what my son remembers, and neither his memory or mine will contain the full picture—the whole truth, so to speak. From the get-go our episodic memories are incomplete....
“Nascent memories are highly susceptible to influence and creative editing, especially during the period—hours, days, and longer—when these memories are being consolidated, before they’re committed to long-term memory.
“In the process of consolidating an episodic memory, your brain is like a sticky-fingered, madcap chef. While it stirs together the ingredients of what you noticed for any particular memory, the recipe can change, often dramatically, with additions and subtractions supplied by imagination, opinion, or assumptions. The recipe can also be warped by a dream, something you read or heard, a movie, a photograph, an association, your emotional state, someone else’s memory, or even mere suggestion.
“And every time we retrieve a stored memory for what happened, it’s highly likely that we change the memory....” [Much more detail in the book.] p. 99-101
“Prospective memory is your memory for what you need to do later. This kind of memory is a bit like mental time travel. You’re creating an intention for your future you. This is your brain’s to-do list, a memory to be recalled at a future time and place. And it is fraught with forgetting. In fact, prospective memory is so poorly supported by our neural circuitry and so steeped in failure, it can almost be thought of as a kind of forgetting rather than a kind of memory.” p. 132 1
To help remember, create a cue – time-based, event-based
“This kind of memory is highly susceptible to failure.” p. 133 ¶2
“When it comes to saving your memories, repetition is a mighty warrior in the battle against time.
“But maybe you want to forget something.... Stop repeating the story of what happened. Stop going over the details with your friends and in your thoughts. Don’t overlearn the experience. If you can find the discipline to leave those memories alone, they will eventually fade.... The emotional elements of that memory can gradually decay if left alone. It is through the erosion of memory that time heals all wounds.” p. 151 ¶1-2
“We tend to vilify forgetting. We cast it as the bad guy in the epic battle against everyone’s favorite hero, Remembering. But forgetting isn’t always a regrettable sign of aging, pathological symptom of dementia, a shameful failure, a maladaptive problem to solve, or even accidental. Remembering today the details of what happened yesterday isn’t always beneficial. Sometimes, we want to forget what we know.
“We also tend to think of forgetting as our default setting. Unless you actively do something remember some piece of information, your brain will automatically forget it. Easily.... We forget without trying... because we didn’t pay enough attention... because we didn’t create strong enough relevant cues.... Forgetting can also be artful—active, deliberate, motivated, targeted, and desirable.” p. 156 ¶1-2
About active ways of forgetting (motivated forgetting) beginning p. 159, p. 163
“So while we all want to an amazing memory, we can’t put all the onus and credit on remembering. An optimally function memory system involves a finely orchestrated balancing act between data storage and data disposal: remembering and forgetting. When performing optimally, memory doesn’t remember everything. It retains what is meaningful and useful, and it discards what isn’t. It keeps the signal and purges the noise. Our ability to forget is likely to be just as vital as is our ability to remember.” p. 163 ¶last
“Using the strategies and insights you’ve read about in this book—paying attention, decreasing distractors, rehearsing, self-testing, creating meaning, using visual and spatial imagery, keep a diary—will improve memory at any age. They may have a less powerful effect on your memory performance at seventy than they would if you were thirty, but these methods still work.” p. 172-173
“Memory creation requires attention. Paying attention is the number one thing you can do to improve your memory at any age, and a lack of attention will impair it. Every time..... What else boosts or blocks memory formation and retrieval? Often, our ability remember depends on context.” p. 189 ¶1
“You’ll be better able to recall ... information if you’re in the same state as you were [hungry, hot, tired, stressed, thirsty, etc.] when you learned it.” p. 194 ¶2
About sleep and memory, beginning p. 207
Sleep is not doing nothing, it’s a biologically busy state that’s vital to health.
"Sleeping also hits the save button on ... newly encoded memories. It saves memories in two steps: First, the unique pattern of neural activity that occurred in your brain when you were experiencing, learning, and even rehearsing something while awake is reactivated during sleep. This neural replay is thought to facilitate the linking of these connections, cementing them into a single memory. In fact, the amount of replay that occurs during the consolidation process while you snooze correlates with the amount of memory you’ll be able to recall after you wake up.” p. 209 ¶1
Lack of sleep interferes with consolidation of memories.
Naps can help.
“A growing body of evidence suggests that sleep is critical for reducing your risk of Alzheimer’s disease.... Most neuroscientists believe that Alzheimer’s is caused by an accumulation of amyloid plaques. Normally, amyloid is cleared away and metabolized by glial cells, the janitors of your brain. As a group, these cells form your brain’s sewage and sanitation department. During deep sleep, your glial cells flush away any metabolic debris that has accumulated in your synapses while you were in the business of being awake. Deep sleep is like a power cleanse for your brain. And one of the most important things that is cleared away during your nightly slumber is amyloid.
With not enough deep sleep “the glial cells won’t have enough time to finish cleaning your brain, and you will wake up in the morning with amyloid left over in your synapses from yesterday. An amyloid hangover.” p. 213
More, more, more in this chapter. Read it again. In fact, read the whole book again!
My only complaint of this book is that there are no notes to support her statements.
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