Give Your Brain the Nutrition It Needs
Your brain needs fuel in order to function. Some experts estimate that the brain uses 20 percent or more of the body’s energy. Glucose and antioxidants are important components of your brain’s nutrition, so make sure your diet includes plenty of whole grains, fruit, and vegetables. The brain also may benefit from folates—found in leafy green vegetables, lentils, and other legumes. Folic acid, a laboratory produced version of folate, is included in many multivitamins and some fortified foods. Many studies also show that daily recommended doses of vitamin E and selenium may help slow the diminishment of cognitive functions. Recently, Lipoic acid and Coenzyme Q have been recognized to improve brain health, cognitive function, and memory.
Enhance Your Memory with These Methods
Though most doctors agree that you don’t need any formal mental gymnastics to keep your brain fit and functioning, many people have found that certain techniques or activities have helped them hone their memory. The simple techniques offered here can give you a leg up in bolstering your ability to learn and recall new information.
Imagine this scenario: You’re getting ready for work in the morning, and one of those morning news television programs is chattering away in the background. You hear one of the announcers mention a product development that gives you an idea for one of the projects your team is involved in at work. You tell yourself you’re going to research the product further once you hit the office, and discuss your ideas with your team. But by the time you’re backing your car out of the driveway, you’ve put the whole thing out of your mind. When you get to work, you have a sense that there’s something you were going to do, but . . .
Events, ideas, information that pass into the hippocampus will pass right on out again, unless you do something to lock them down—by associating them with other memory that is already safely stored and ready for retrieval. The more associations the memory is tied to, the more likely you are to be able to store and retrieve it later. In psychology, this technique of associating new information with a range of memories for stronger recall is called elaborative encoding. It takes place in your frontal lobes—an area of your brain that always can use a good workout.
Create mental pictographs or visualizations: You’ve heard the trick of memorizing names by associating each with familiar images. To remember six items you must pick up at the store on the way home, you may create a mental image of a chicken swimming in a kidney-shaped pool full of tomato juice that has a diving board made of a broad stalk of celery. On the edge of the pool rest brown life preservers studded with raisins and a lidded jar of thick sunblock cream. You stop to pick up chicken, kidney beans, tomato juice, celery, raisin bagels, and butter.
Use the “Roman Room”: Ancient Romans used this practice to help them memorize long speeches, lists of objects, city names, and so on. To try it, envision a room. Then place around the room visual cues that remind you of items from your to-do list, shopping list, or other types of information. A coat draped over a chair reminds you of the dry cleaning that needs to be picked up. A pair of skis leaning in the corner reminds you to call the travel agent about your plane tickets for your trip to Vermont. Travel around the room in your mind, and make a mental note of sensory cues given off by the items—the colors, sounds, and smells of the items, how they coexist with each other in the room, and any reaction they evoke in you. Make the images as vivid and compelling as possible. The room should continue to exist in your mind as a real place, with each of its furnishings a reminder of the things, people, or events you want to lock in your memory.
Go into training for long-term lockdown: When you have stored information in your long-term memory—not just until you leave work or get through tomorrow’s meeting—put your memory technique into a training program. Review the information you need to remember at least three times a day for the next three to five days. At the end of your training program, you should have the information safely in the vault.
Most of all, remember to work hard at preserving and building your cognitive functions, but try to enjoy the ride. After all, if you’re worried about your memory, you probably aren’t too far down the forgetfulness trail to get your ability to store and recall new information back up to speed.
