The noise of modern life is making it harder to remember, but we can manage what stays in a brain, says Professor Charan Ranganath.
Now where did I leave the car keys this time? If that’s a question you’ve asked yourself a few times recently, you may not take comfort from the words of the American neuroscientist Charan Ranganath. “Episodic memory declines as we get older,” he says. “It leads us increasingly to experience the frustration of misplaced keys, forgotten names and baffled moments when we forget what we were just talking about.” Sound familiar? What were we talking about again?
But we shouldn’t feel too bad about it. As Ranganath writes in his new book, Why We Remember: “The reality is we are designed to forget.” Memory is incomplete, inaccurate and gets worse as we get older. Each time we delve into the chaotic filing system of the neocortex — the densely folded mass of grey tissue that stores memories — we have to flick through a jumble of other memories before we find the one we need. And modern life isn’t helping.
Add in emails, conversations, television, books and social media and we now process an unprecedented quantity of information every day — 34 gigabytes by one estimate.
So how do we cut out the noise? “We need to prioritise what is important so we can rapidly deploy that information when needed,” says Ranganath, 53, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis.