At some point in our lives, we struggle with memory, remembering the name of the book you were reading yesterday or the word on the tip of your tongue.
During conversations with the seniors with whom I live at Abbeyfield House, we might try to remember a name. It’s almost like a game where we start adding details around the name that we are trying to remember, layering the information, and eventually the right trigger brings the name back like a prize!
When I listened to an interview with Anthony Wagner, a memory expert at Stanford University, I realized that all memories are built up piece by piece. The “game” that we play at Abbeyfield is not unique to seniors; it is part of the normal memory process of remembering.
Wagner says all systems of the brain which use the input of our senses build particular kinds of memories. He says different systems build different kinds of memories, so there’s an overlap in memory in the brain instead of only one way to remember. Memories are multidimensional. An event we experience consists of many different things, and these different dimensions of an event are represented in different regions in our brain. Wagner says when there’s an event you’re remembering, you may remember the smell, what you saw, what you heard, and all those things are coming from different parts of the brain.
The brain is constantly building memory traces. I might remember the face of someone I saw at a party. I remember the space in which we met. I remember bits of our conversation. But what was their name? We’re trying to use those cues to reactivate the memory traces in the brain to pull out the information we want to remember.
Basically, memory is the link between a bunch of different things that happened at the same time.
Remembering one part of the experience helps you trace the memory to other parts of the brain where other parts of the memory are stored.
Wagner says we can learn to remember things better by paying attention to what we are experiencing rather than trying to multitask. Minimizing distractions helps us to retain memories. We can further solidify that memory by testing ourselves a few times after the initial experience. For example, if I am trying to memorize the words to our Sunday choir anthem, I can read it and listen to the music once, and then try to repeat it back to myself several times, checking for accuracy.
Wagner says after you have laid down a memory trace, one of the most powerful ways to ensure that you can remember that event well into the future is to test your memory. You might write about the events of the day in your diary each night. You might reminisce about the event, sharing a story with friends and family. Try to reconstruct the memory. Bring it back to mind.
Ruth Griffiths is a regular columnist in the Prince Albert Daily Herald Rural Roots edition and a former Rural Roots editor.
