The Science Of Memory: How To Get Better At Remembering And Be Okay With Forgetting | Charan Ranganath

1. Shift to Remembering Better

Focus on optimizing your ability to remember what truly matters, rather than trying to recall every detail of an experience, because memory’s role is to make sense of the present and navigate the future, not to be a comprehensive archive.

2. Embrace Forgetting as Useful

Understand that forgetting is not a failure but an essential process that clears mental bandwidth, allowing you to retain and access the information you truly need.

3. Practice Present Moment Awareness

When performing routine actions like placing keys, be fully awake and aware, noting distinctive sights, sounds, or thoughts to better encode the memory and prevent everyday forgetting.

4. Cultivate Intellectual Humility

Recognize that your memories are inherently unreliable, dynamic, and subject to bias, fostering humility about your convictions and perceptions of past events.

5. Use Meditation for Memory Perspective

Employ mindfulness practices to notice when you’re caught in ‘memory mode’ (ruminating or anticipating) and to cultivate an external, non-judgmental perspective on your memories, which can help manage their emotional impact.

6. Avoid Multitasking for Memory

Refrain from doing two things at once when you want to remember something, as switching between tasks fragments memories, taxes executive function, and hinders meaningful processing.

7. Prioritize Quality Sleep

Ensure sufficient sleep to improve attention, reduce stress, allow brain restoration, strengthen memories through replay, and foster new insights by transforming episodic memories into semantic knowledge.

8. Embrace Error-Driven Learning

Actively test your memory, even before full memorization, and allow yourself to make mistakes; this process strengthens memories and improves long-term learning by allowing your brain to correct and refine its predictions.

9. Make Memories Distinctive

To improve recall, focus on what makes a moment or piece of information unique, as distinctiveness helps your brain differentiate it from similar memories and makes it easier to find later.

10. Leverage Meaning and Organization

Connect new information you want to remember with existing knowledge or create meaningful links, even arbitrary ones, to provide more paths for retrieval.

11. Plant Future Cues

To remember to do something in the future, imagine your future self encountering a specific environmental cue that will trigger the memory of the task, like tying a string around your finger.

12. Apply Chunking for Information

Group individual pieces of information into larger, meaningful units (chunks) to reduce the cognitive load and make it easier to hold in working memory, such as grouping phone numbers.

13. Cultivate Curiosity in Relationships

Actively seek out what’s new and changing in long-term relationships, as novelty and curiosity help your brain better encode information about people you interact with regularly.

14. Practice Reflective Listening

Engage in active listening by repeating back the essence of what someone has said in your own words; this deliberate reconstruction strengthens the memory of the conversation.

15. Be Aware of Mood’s Influence

Understand that your current mood acts as a filter, influencing which memories you recall and how you interpret them, which can explain getting stuck in negative thought cycles.

16. Recognize Memory’s Role in Bias

Be aware that subconscious learning from repeated exposure can create biases that subtly influence your decisions, helping you make choices freer of these biases.

17. Question Overly Resonant Memories

Be skeptical of recollections that correspond too closely to your existing beliefs, as this can indicate a memory that has been shaped by current perspectives rather than pure factual recall.

18. Understand Collective Memory’s Impact

Recognize that sharing memories and hearing others’ perspectives can transform your own recollections, contributing to a collective memory that shapes individual understanding of past events.