Afraid of losing your memory? Expert offers tips on how to retain it – including exercise
- Diabetes, depression and having too little sleep and too much stress can badly affect memory; exercise and meditation help keep it fresh
Minor, everyday memory lapses can be maddening: where did you put the car keys? What was it that you wanted to say?
Is there something wrong with your memory?
The neural mechanisms of memory are not designed to remember things like the name of someone we met at a party, according to Charan Ranganath, a professor of neuroscience and psychology and director of the memory and plasticity programme at the University of California, Davis. So it’s normal to forget them.
“Memory is the process by which our brains extract what’s important – that is, information that helps us make sense of an uncertain and ever-changing world,” he writes in an article published recently in the New York-based business magazine Fast Company.
“We tend to focus on our shortcomings when it comes to memory, but for the most part we do a pretty good job of remembering what we need to, thanks to the prefrontal cortex,” Ranganath says.
