![]() ![]() surgeons collectively leave hundreds of surgical instruments inside their patients’ bodies-chunking information into meaningful units, and the method of loci, or visualizing information in a familiar environment. (An exhausted Yo-Yo Ma once left his eighteenth-century Venetian cello, worth $2.5 million, in the trunk of a New York City yellow cab.) Other strategies include leaning on external cues, such as checklists-every year, U.S. “If you don’t have Alzheimer’s and you pay attention to what your partner is saying, you’re going to remember what they said.” (Distracted spouses, take note.) Also, get enough sleep. (He also turned to the comforts of the bottle and died of complications from alcoholism, although Genova doesn’t mention this.)Īn efficient memory system, Genova writes, involves “a finely orchestrated balancing act between data storage and data disposal.” To retain an encounter, deliberate attention alone will get you most of the way there. “remember in excruciatingly vivid detail the very worst, most painful days of their lives.” The most studied case concerns Solomon Shereshevsky, an early-twentieth-century Russian journalist who, like Borges’s Funes the Memorious, “felt burdened by excessive and often irrelevant information and had enormous difficulty filtering, prioritizing, and forgetting what he didn’t want or need.” Desperate to empty his mind, Shereshevsky practiced, with some success, various visualization exercises: he’d imagine setting fire to his memories or picture them scrawled on a giant chalkboard and then erased. While the average person can list no more than ten events for any given year of life, people living with H.S.A.M. The sixty or so members of our species whose brains are not sieves have their own diagnosis: highly superior autobiographical memory, or hyperthymesia. “You can be 100 percent confident in your vivid memory,” Genova writes, “and still be 100 percent wrong.”įorgetfulness is our “default setting,” and that’s a good thing. It is sobering to realize that three out of four prisoners who are later exonerated through DNA evidence were initially convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony. A dream, a suggestion, and even the mere passage of time can warp a memory. The fragments of experience that do get encoded into long-term memory are then subject to “creative editing.” To remember an event is to reimagine it in the reimagining, we inadvertently introduce new information, often colored by our current emotional state. In “ Remember,” an engrossing survey of the latest research, Lisa Genova explains that a healthy brain quickly forgets most of what passes into conscious awareness. Any study of memory is, in the main, a study of its frailty.
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