Keep Forgetting Things? Neuroscience Says These 5 Simple Habits Boost Memory and Learning

Do things like these ever happen to you?

• You put your keys in a perfect spot. "They're right here on the table," you think. "Right here on the table." Later, you spend 25 minutes looking for your keys.
• You need three things at the store: bread, milk, butter. No need to write this down: "A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter. A loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter." You get to the store, grab the milk, and you can't for the life of you remember the other two items.
• Your nephew asks something like: "Uncle Billy, remember when you came to Gram's house for Thanksgiving, and Uncle Jimmy reached in front of you, and Gram took out the little toy pig you had when you were kids for when people had bad manners, and she put it in front of Uncle Jimmy, but then Uncle Jimmy noticed something Uncle Chris did and moved the pig in front of him?" Meanwhile, you're thinking to yourself: "Wait, where did I go on Thanksgiving?"

It happens to all of us. (I'll confess all three examples above are mine from real life.)

At the same time, I've had the chance over the past few years to explore quite a few things that people can do to improve and sustain their memories, often based on research in neuroscience. Because, if there's one thing successful business leaders seem to share as they get older, it's that fear of losing their memory and other cognitive abilities is at the top of the list.

Before we forget some of the best of these, let's revisit them in one place.

1. Eat specific foods

This is a good one to start with, especially because I like the simplest bits of advice, and adding or emphasizing things in your diet is a pretty simple one. Specifics:

• Mushrooms. Writing in the Journal of Neurochemistry, Australian scientists reported last month that a specific type of mushrooms contain an active compound that "boosts nerve growth and enhances memory." Separately, Pennsylvania State University researchers found that other types of mushrooms -- porcini may be the best -- contain antioxidants that fight medical conditions associated with aging, like cancer, coronary heart disease, and Alzheimer's disease.
• Dark chocolate and cinnamon. Just to keep going, a few other tasty foods (albeit largely dissonant ones): dark chocolate (an Italian study suggests dark chocolate provides as much as three months' cognitive benefit) and cinnamon (a review in Nutritional Neuroscience of more than 2,600 studies found that cinnamon significantly improves cognitive function.)
• Vegetables of all kinds. A Harvard study followed the eating habits of 27,842 men over 20 years. Their conclusions? The ones who ate the most vegetables and fruit -- even fruit juice -- had less memory loss late in life.

Honestly, the mushrooms alone would be enough good news for this article for me, because there's practically no food I don't think it goes with.

2. Build good relationships

We've seen many times that the key to a happy and fulfilled life is very likely to focus first on your relationships. And there are so many simple, practical ways to improve relationship quality.

Perhaps most surprising: Make a habit of auditing your relationships. Write them down, and categorize the ones that provide value, and the ones you'd like to improve. It's a lot easier to improve things if you measure them.

Now, there's research suggesting memory is also impacted by relationships, and that (according to a Baylor College of Medicine study reported in the journal, Neuron), during periods of social isolation, the most prevalent cells in our brains, known as astrocytes, "become hyperactive, which in turn suppresses brain circuit function and memory formation."

3. Improve your environment

Another easy one: Michigan State University researchers studying Nile grass rats say they found that rats kept in dimly lit environments lost nearly a third of capacity in the part of their brains devoted to leaning and memory, compared with those in brighter environments.

As the study authors put it: "Dim lights are producing dimwits."

And, I think we can associate this one with the above: A study at the Chronobiology and Sleep Institute at the University of Pennsylvania found that even a small sleep deficit leads to correlative "deficits ... in vigilance and episodic memory."

Perhaps what's most fascinating about the last point is that at a certain level of sleep deficit, the brain loses the ability to sense just how tired you actually are.

4. Spend your time wisely

A variety of cognitive-based activities seems to help, among them:

• Detailed hobbies, like bird-watching, that require you to process and recall information.
• Reading for pleasure. Researchers from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign found that reading for pleasure, 90 minutes at a time, "strengthened older adults' memory skills."
• Doing brain games and crosswords. Researchers from Columbia and Duke universities found that study participants who did crosswords improved "cognition, function, and neuroprotection."

5. Walk backward

Let's end on this one. I love it because it's so unexpected and quirky. But, researchers at the University of Roehampton in London came up with the idea of testing whether simply walking backward could trigger better recall.

Sure enough, it worked. "Motion-induced past-directed mental time travel improved mnemonic performance for different types of information," said one of the study leads. "We have named this a 'mnemonic time-travel effect.'"

Ironically, I have to point out, "walking backward" is easier to remember than "motion-induced past-directed mental time travel."