Actress Marilu Henner describes what life is like with a highly superior autobiographical memory. By studying people like her, researchers are learning how to strengthen recall. In the meantime, consider these expert tips for improving your own ability to remember.
Few people have an extraordinary memory retrieval system like actress Marilu Henner. She compares it to a library’s card catalog or the scene-by-scene visual menu on a DVD.
As much as we all might want a retrieval system as extraordinary as Henner’s, science hasn’t proved yet that we can improve the way we retrieve memories we’ve already made, says James McGaugh, PhD, founding chair of the department of neurobiology and behavior and founding director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California-Irvine. But you can take steps to strengthen memories as you make them, he says.
Memories become stronger in two ways, he says. ”The first involves strong emotion. An experience that’s very exciting or upsetting will turn on the brain systems that automatically make strong memories. Adrenaline and cortisol are released from the adrenal gland and activate the amygdala. In turn, the amygdala communicates with all other regions of the brain and, in effect, says ‘Something important happened, make a strong memory.’” That aspect of memory-making is not under our control—it just happens, whether we want it to or not.
“I call those moments ‘flashbulb memories,’” says Ronald Petersen, MD, PhD, director of the Mayo Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and professor of neurology at Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Rochester, MN. “You remember vividly what you were doing when you heard about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy or the Challenger disaster or the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001,” he says.
Another way to strengthen a memory is to go over and over it in your head. “We call this ‘rehearsal,’” Dr. McGaugh says. “If there’s an experience or an aspect of your day that you really want to remember, think about it, again and again, calling up all the details. The more you rehearse it, the stronger the memory will be.”
Downtime is ideal for memory rehearsal, says Dr. McGaugh. One of the people with HSAM that he studied used traffic jams to reflect on where he was and what he was doing last year on that day, or the year before, or the year before that. “Most of us can’t do that, of course, but we can rehearse what we did yesterday and try to improve our memory of it.”
