What's that word? It's on the tip of your tongue?
You'll remember it at 2 a.m.
You're not going crazy, right?

You'll feel a whole lot better about your aging brain if you read:
Remember: The Science of Memory and The Art of Forgetting, by Neuroscientist and Alzheimer's disease specialist Lisa Genova.

Genova shows us how our brain operates to create and retrieve our memories and knowledge.
Various kinds of memory are processed and held in different ways.

Learning data through repetition is called semantic memory.
That missing word or lost name is somewhere in your semantic memory - which is not the most reliable, as we age.

Muscle memory, created in your motor cortex through repeated muscle movement, is one of the reliable types of memory.

We hold our brain in high regard, and we tend to expect it to do everything perfectly.
But the brain was not designed to cover everything.

According to Genova, the brain is not designed to

  • remember people's names
  • remember a list
  • remember to do something later ("prospective memory")
  • remember the exact details of an important event in the past ("episodic memory")
  • keep track of everything we ever encounter

Let yourself off the hook for all of the above, and understand you'll have to help your brain with those.

Mark your calendar as needed.
Use checklists. (That's what we do in surgery to keep track of all our tools, inside and outside the belly.)
Put up reminders, alarms, chimes for reminders.
If you need to bring along an item today, put it at the door (as you've been doing already, Ms. Brilliance).

Genova says it's normal to walk into a room and forget what you came for (especially for persons of my age).
No need to worry yourself about that.

After all, there's a lot more stuffed into your head now than there was, decades ago, right?

(Personally, I have never cared to remember the names of the latest movie stars, and my family looks askance at me. Ask me if I care. I have other priorities in my memory bank.)

Have you noticed that your memory stays strong on the topics you really care about?
If something is meaningful to you, you will retain it.
When you give your full attention to something, you will remember it.

To create a strong memory, you start with

  1. attentiveness - you care about this, whatever it is.
  2. Your prefrontal cortex encodes it.
  3. You then send it to the hippocampus of the brain to consolidate it
  4. and place it into a pattern of neurons, unique to that memory.

When you recall the memory, you use that pattern of neurons to retrieve it.
(You might even watch that happening, several tangents converging to firm up that memory.)

It's true that the brain loses some of its sharpness as we age, but that does not mean we're slipping into Alzheimer's.
If you can't find your car in the parking lot, that's probably normal because you weren't paying attention when you parked it.

But if you're standing there holding car keys, and you don't know what those keys are for, then you might have Alzheimer's.
(That's not a diagnostic test . . .)

And let us remember -
Forgetting is a great service the brain does for us, especially to release traumatic memories.

Finally, Genova gives us some great tips on:

How to boost a stronger memory and brain function

  • stimulating hobbies
  • learning new things
  • using your neural pathways and laying down new ones
  • sleep and exercise
  • healthy engaged lifestyle, active social life
  • hydration is vital
  • healthy foods - veggies, greens, olive oil, legumes, whole grains and fish
  • Chronic stress impairs the brain, so use meditation to de-stress.

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Diane Stallings RN does distance healing, EFT tapping, and/or Biofield Tuning on the phone, energy healing sessions, Chakra Balancing, and health coaching. She gives you practical ways to lift your wellbeing. Make an appointment in Phoenix or Fountain Hills or on the phone anywhere.

brain n landscape 96d Gerd Altmann Pixabay

(Thanks to Gerd Altmann of Pixabay for this image.)