Q: How can I improve my mem­ory? Is there a daily exer­cise I can do to improve it?

A: The most impor­tant com­po­nent of mem­ory is atten­tion. By choos­ing to attend to some­thing and focus on it, you cre­ate a per­sonal inter­ac­tion with it, which gives it per­sonal mean­ing, mak­ing it eas­ier to remem­ber.

Elab­o­ra­tion and rep­e­ti­tion are the most com­mon ways of cre­at­ing that per­sonal inter­ac­tion. Elab­o­ra­tion involves cre­at­ing a rich con­text for the expe­ri­ence by adding together visual, audi­tory, and other infor­ma­tion about the fact. By weav­ing a web of infor­ma­tion around that fact, you cre­ate mul­ti­ple access points to that piece of infor­ma­tion. On the other hand, rep­e­ti­tion drills in the same path­way over and over until it is a well-worn path that you can eas­ily find.

One com­mon tech­nique used by stu­dents, is actu­ally, not that help­ful. Mnemonic tech­niques of using the first let­ter of each word in a series won’t help you remem­ber the actual words. It will help you remem­ber the order of words you already know. The phrase My Very Ener­getic Mother Just Screamed Utter Non­sense can help you remem­ber the order the plan­ets in our solar sys­tem, but it won’t help you recall the indi­vid­ual planet names: Mer­cury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Sat­urn, Uranus, Nep­tune.

These tech­niques do help you improve your mem­ory on a behav­ioral level, but not on a fun­da­men­tal brain struc­ture level. The main rea­son it gets harder for you to learn and remem­ber new things as you age is that your brain’s pro­cess­ing speed slows down as you get older. It becomes harder to do more than one thing at the same time, so it’s eas­ier to get con­fused. Your brain may also become less flex­i­ble, so it’s harder to change learn­ing strate­gies in mid-stream. All these things mean it becomes harder to focus. So far, there’s noth­ing you can do to change your brain’s pro­cess­ing speed, but there are tech­niques you can use to increase your learn­ing per­for­mance, even if your pro­cess­ing speed has slowed.

Focus
Alert­ness, focus, con­cen­tra­tion, moti­va­tion, and height­ened aware­ness are largely a mat­ter of atti­tude. Focus takes effort. In fact, most mem­ory com­plaints have noth­ing to do with the actual abil­ity of the brain to remem­ber things. They come from a fail­ure to focus prop­erly on the task at hand.

If you want to learn or remem­ber some­thing, con­cen­trate on just that one thing. Tune out every­thing else. The harder the task, the more impor­tant it is to tune out dis­trac­tions. (If some­one tells you they can do their home­work bet­ter with the TV or radio on, don’t believe it. Any speech or speech-like sounds auto­mat­i­cally use up part of your brain’s atten­tion capac­ity, whether you are aware of it or not.) In other words, it can be hard to do more than one thing at once, and it nat­u­rally gets harder as you get older. The solu­tion is to make more of an effort not to let your­self get dis­tracted until you’ve fin­ished what you have to do.

Strat­egy:
When you learn some­thing new, take breaks so that the facts won’t inter­fere with one another as you study them. If you’ve ever been to a movie dou­ble fea­ture, you know that you’ll have a hard time remem­ber­ing the plot and details of the first movie imme­di­ately after see­ing the sec­ond. Inter­fer­ence also works the other way. Some­times when your friend gets a new tele­phone num­ber, the old one will still be so famil­iar to you that it’s hard to remem­ber the new one.

Engage
Your brain remem­bers things by their mean­ing. If you spend a lit­tle effort extra up front to cre­ate mean­ing, you’ll need less effort later to recall it. When you read or hear a word you don’t already know — for exam­ple, “phocine” — your brain has to work harder. First, you have to remem­ber how to spell it long enough to look it up in a dic­tio­nary. There, you’ll see it means “seal-like” and it’s pro­nounced “fo-sine.” Now pic­ture a seal in your mind and repeat the word aloud. Even say “Fo! Fo! Fo!” aloud like a seal bark­ing. The sound of the word, its spelling, the image of a seal, and the bark­ing all work together to form mem­ory links. The more links the bet­ter to help you trig­ger the word later on, when you want to use it to describe, say, a sun­bather in a black one-piece.

Strat­egy:
Say you’re on vaca­tion in Maui, stay­ing at a beach­front hotel in room #386. How do you remem­ber that? Method num­ber one: Pause for a minute to take a men­tal snap­shot of your room door viewed from an out­side van­tage point. Then, when you return to that same van­tage point, you’ll know which door is yours. Method num­ber two: Stop and think for a minute. You’re on the third floor, which is the top floor of the hotel, so the num­ber 3 is easy. Now for the 8 and the 6. The expres­sion “to eighty-six” comes to mind — as in to get rid of, do away with, or throw out. As in what your boss will do to you if you decide to spend an extra week in Maui. Done.

You will find more related infor­ma­tion on how to improve short-term mem­ory by check­ing out these resources:

- Neu­ro­science Inter­view Series: inter­views with over 15 brain sci­en­tists and experts.

- Col­lec­tion of brain teasers and games: atten­tion, mem­ory, problem-solving, visual, and more.
- Brain Train­ing Games and “Games”: a 10-Question Check­list on how to eval­u­ate pro­grams that make brain-related claims.