How to Enhance Your Memory for Significant Moments in Your Life

We attach great importance to memories. We collect pictures and other mementos to help us remember significant events in our lives: weddings, funerals, the birth of a child, family reunions. These mementos help us to retrieve our memories, re-experience them and share them with other people. Your memories tell the story of your life.
Not every moment of a person’s life is memorable. Sometimes I find myself unable to recall what I was thinking a moment ago or what I did yesterday. Sometimes the days blend together. When I’m asked: what did you do over the weekend, it may be a real chore to figure that out.
The inability to remember day-to-day events in your life (what psychologists call episodic memory) has a bearing on your self-conception. It is difficult to live deliberately if you can’t remember what you’ve done.

Few of us can remember everything we do. Nor do we necessarily want to remember everything. We want to remember the significant moments. How do we do that?

Take Good Care of Your Hippocampus

Episodic memory is your ability to remember moments in your life, such as where you’ve been and what you’ve been doing. The formation of episodic memories depends on a brain structure called the hippocampus. Here is how to take good care of your hippocampus:

1. Get rest: rest helps your hippocampus grow new neurons that are important for forming lasting memories. Naps are more effective for helping you to retain memories than caffeine. Caffeine might actually increase your confidence in your memory, while reducing your ability to form new memories.

2. Don’t drink so much caffeine: caffeine might prevent your brain from growing new neurons. Caffeine will also increase stress hormones in your system and disrupt sleep. Yet, drinking coffee and tea also appear to have protective effects on your brain. It might be best to limit caffeine to one breakfast boost a day.

3. Avoid persistent stress: stress hormones can actually damage your brain. To counteract stress: exercise, go for a walk, spend time with friends, meditate, have (safe) sex, find a hobby. A little bit of pressure helps us to accomplish great things. A lot of pressure just causes trauma.

4. Avoid processed sugar (especially high-fructose corn syrup): recent evidence suggests that processed sugar could be bad for your hippocampus in the long-run, disrupting the processes that enable new memories to be laid down. Sugar highs and lows also increase stress. While a sugar jolt might not cause problems with your memory today, a sugary diet may cause memory and other health problems as you get older.

Keep a Structured Journal

Another way of improving your episodic memory is to offload the task onto a structured journal–a journal designed to keep track of things you care about. I recommend using Evernote for keeping a daily journal and I recommend journaling throughout the course of the day–especially right before you go to bed. Journaling throughout the course of the day will help you catch interesting moments in your life not long after they’ve happened. There are many different effective ways of using a journal to keep track of significant events in your life. Here are two strategies:

1. Journal everything positive about your day: this is a trick from cognitive therapy designed to shift your attention from keeping track of negative events to keeping track of positive events. You obviously need to be able to keep track of both, but too much focus on the negative is bad for your stress levels, bad for your brain, and generally disempowering.

2. Develop a set of goals to track with your journal: Specify a set of life goals for yourself and use them as categories for making entries into your journal. Your goals might be Health, Career, Relationships, Aesthetic Experiences. When getting started, you would always writes entries in your journal under these categories. Even if it seems like the most trivial thing, like “Aesthetics: I liked the way the sun shined through the clouds on my walk today”, note it. It was a positive experience and it fits your goals. It matters.

Bottom-line: while journaling might help you to focus and reinforce memories, you lose a lot of value from a journal if it’s not fit for review. You should actually read your journal, and write journal entries that will make sense to you when you come back to them.

Be Like Sherlock Holmes

The feeling that you’re having a new experience–the sense of novelty–can help you to remember your experiences. To experience this sense of novelty, you need to be able to notice the differences between what you’re seeing now and what you’ve seen before. The technical term for the ability to recognize differences is called ‘sensory discrimination’.

In a recent movie incarnation of Sherlock Holmes, Holmes is depicted as a sensory maniac:  deeply inhaling the odors around him, attending to the distinctive street sounds of different parts of town, constantly tasting, touching and testing his surroundings. In the movie, Holmes has a super-high capacity for sensory discrimination–he notices details that other people don’t. Holmes appears to revel in his senses, enjoying his ability to notice what others don’t. What does this have to do with real life?

In real life, people can actually be trained to notice very subtle details. Food and wine experts do it, artists do it, and experts on reading facial expression do it. Here are some exercises you could try at home:

1. Enhancing gustation» and olfaction» through comparative mindful eating: Your ability to taste and smell are tightly intertwined. Training one sense should help the other. To train your senses with food, first try to have ready more than one variety of the food you’re interested in. For example, more than one brand of chocolate or more than one variety of apple. Your goal is to note as many differences as possible between the two varieties. Take a look at what you’re about to eat and note the differences of color, shape and texture. Next, take whatever you’re eating or drinking and stick it up to your nose and smell it. Take a bite of it and pay attention to the texture and flavor of what you are eating. Ask yourself how the features of this food are similar to other foods you’ve eaten. Maybe the chocolate has a buttery flavor or even olive flavor. Write down your thoughts as you go. Take a sip of water and swish it around your mouth to cleanse your palate. Repeat the process for the other variety of food, e.g. the other brand of chocolate, referring to your notes to help you recognize the differences.

2. Seeing by Drawing: I’ve read that Leonardo Da Vinci worked to enhance his ability to make visual discriminations by drawing what he saw. Trying to draw what you see, your attention is directed to visual features that you might otherwise have missed. If you go too quickly, your drawing will not be a success. The errors in your drawing help bring your attention to oversights in your visual perception of what you’re looking at. Get a sketch book and go at it.

Remember, it’s your ability to notice the details that will enable you to see what is novel or distinctive about your present experience. The sense of novelty will tell your brain to keep a memory of that moment.

The Big Picture

There are times when we get so distracted by abstract priorities, by the future or the past, that we fail to enjoy the present. Our senses grow weak, dulled by television, video games and (yes) movies (like Sherlock Holmes). We cannot discern where we are and thus we cannot remember what we have done with our time. Moments of our lives pass us by, while we observe the imaginary lives of others and endlessly fret about our future selves.

Your life is the sum of every moment you live. If you cannot notice where you are, if you cannot be observant of your surroundings, you lose those moments. Life passes you by. To make the moments of your life significant, you have to learn to treat them as if they’re significant. To some extent, that’s a skill.

So take a moment to taste your food, to listen to the background noise in your home, to study the faces of your loved ones. Find in those moments what is unique to them. Those moments are your life. Remember them.

*Photo by sean dreilinger