Covid changed the entire way we interact so quickly,The director — who before Host, had only a few short films

6 min readDec 1, 2020

Welcome back to Inside Your Head 🧠, a weekly newsletter exploring why your brain makes you think, feel, and act the way you do, written by Dana Smith, Elemental’s senior writer and a former brain scientist. Forwarded by a friend? Subscribe here so you won’t miss the next one.

I have a pretty bad memory. It’s not prohibitive — I can remember grocery lists and practical day-to-day things no problem — but friends will occasionally reference conversations or events from years ago that I have little recollection of. I was reminded of my shortcoming recently when my mom, who’s in her seventies and statistically should have a worse memory than I do, alluded to a past Thanksgiving that my college roommate had spent with my family. I have zero memory of this event (sorry, Melissa!). I honestly thought my mom might have made it up until she showed me photos of the two of us baking pies together in my parents’ kitchen.

What gives? Why do some people have minds like an iron trap while others of us are floating around like goldfish? (Any Ted Lasso fans out there?)

Your brain is designed to remember and to forget

There are three main processes when it comes to memory — encoding, consolidation, and retrieval — and problems can occur at any one of these stages to cause you to forget things.
Encoding is closely related to attention, and poor memory is often a reflection of poor attention. The reason you (I) always forget the name of a person you’ve just met is that, quite frankly, you weren’t paying attention when they said it. You could be thinking of what you’re going to say next or whom they remind you of or what you’re going to have for dinner that night. Whatever the reason, the result is that crucial bit of information — their name — didn’t penetrate your brain enough to be stored in your memory. The same thing happens when you’re not paying attention in class, during a conversation, or reading a book. If you’re not concentrating on what you’re doing, you’re not going to remember it.
The consolidation part is when a memory being processed in your short-term memory, which lasts just 30 seconds or so, gets transferred into your long-term memory. Sometimes that happens through repetition — you repeat a name enough times until you finally remember it. Other times an event is tied to an emotion that helps to cement it in your brain. For example, most people clearly remember where they were when they learned the Twin Towers fell on 9/11 because it was such a traumatic day, and emotions like fear and stress were running high. Those feelings, and the corresponding stress hormones, cause you to pay more attention.
In the brain, short-term memory is processed in the prefrontal cortex while consolidation to long-term memory occurs in the hippocampus, although other parts of the brain are involved too. Emotional memories, for instance, also activate the amygdala, the brain’s fear and arousal center, which causes them to be embedded deeper and linger longer. In the last step, long-term memories are transferred from the hippocampus to the neocortex, the top layer of the brain, which has more storage capacity.
The final part of memory is retrieval, when you’re recalling something you’ve memorized previously. During this process, a memory is pulled back up, reactivating the same cells in the hippocampus and the neocortex where that memory is stored. Memories that are regularly recalled get stronger over time — this is another reason emotional memories are stickier; you’re more likely to review them over and over again.
Cell death in the hippocampus, that crucial memory hub involved in both consolidation and retrieval, is one culprit of memory loss. This can happen because of diseases like dementia, severe depression, heavy alcohol use, and even normal aging. However, scientists have discovered that new neurons can be born in the hippocampus as well, most notably as a result of exercise, which can potentially offset some of the cell and memory loss in the region.
The most common cause of memory loss, though, is a simple storage issue. Like a computer, your brain has a finite amount of space and processing capacity. In order to make room for new memories, old ones that aren’t regularly recalled and so presumably aren’t too important (like apparently my Thanksgiving with my old roommate) start to decay. This happens through a breakdown of the connections — called synapses — between brain cells that are forged when you learn something or have a new experience. The more often you reactivate a memory, the stronger those synapses get and the easier the memory will be to recall. If you neglect the memory, though, those connections will get pruned out to make room for new ones.

This made me think of how smartphones are warping our memories

At the beginning of the year, Angela Lashbrook wrote a fascinating article for Elemental about how taking pictures of events actually dampens your memories of them. The reason is that if you’re focused on taking the picture or drafting an Instagram caption, you’re not paying attention to the event itself. You may also be “subconsciously depend[ing] upon the camera to ‘remember’ it for [you],” she writes. However, the photos themselves could spark your memory later, ultimately helping you remember when you look at them. In essence, you’ve offloaded your own memory to the memory of your phone. Let’s hope your iCloud account has more storage than your brain does.

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back next Tuesday with another look inside your head. In the meantime, email or tweet me your best tricks to remember people’s

Covid changed the entire way we interact so quickly,The director — who before Host, had only a few short films

Your brain is designed to remember and to forget

This made me think of how smartphones are warping our memories

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