Quotes

We can learn and remember anything—the unique sound of your child’s voice, the face of a new friend, where you parked your car, that time you walked to the market all by yourself to buy sour cream when you were four years old, the words to the latest Taylor Swift song.

Well, very few of us living in America would be able to experience, much less remember, the market story.

Henry Molaison, the young man who had both hippocampi surgically removed in an effort to treat his unrelenting seizures, was never again able to lay down any new consciously held memories. But remarkably, he could still create new muscle memories. He couldn’t remember what happened five minutes ago, but he could still learn how to do new things.

After we talk about something that happened, this slimmer version of the memory is saved, and so we lose the fuller, original memory. Then, the next time we talk about this memory, maybe we leave out a detail. You don’t mention that it had been raining. When we go to retell what happened a third time, the rain is gone from the memory. So as soon as an episodic memory leaves my lips, it contains less information than the original memory had.

Let’s imagine that I show you and a friend a photograph of a man’s face. I tell you that the man in the picture is a baker. I tell your friend that the last name of the man in the picture is Baker. A couple of days later, I show each of you the same photograph and ask if you can remember anything about the man in the picture. You are much more likely to remember baker than your friend is to remember Baker.

Many studies demonstrate that stress jams up memory retrieval. For example, subjects given cortisol show deficits in fetching previously learned information compared with subjects given saline. If the release of cortisol is blocked, retrieval of established memories is normal.

So chronic stress is bad for your memory.