see Ways to Maximize Your Memory at Any Age.
Due to this information inundation, the quest to expand our capacity to remember important knowledge has become increasingly avid. Several new scientific studies shed light on how people of all ages can make the most of their memory:
Be curious: Curiosity may not have been the best thing for the proverbial kitty cat, but it turns out that this trait can do wonders for human memory capacity. “Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it,” says Matthias Gruber, postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis Center for Neuroscience in a statement. Gruber and his colleagues recently recruited a group of cognitively health individuals to participate in a study on how curiosity impacts memory performance. Participants were shown a set of trivia questions and asked to indicate how interested they were in the subject of each question. Then, MRI brain scans of participants’ brains were taken as they were shown a random image of a face with a neutral expression that wasn’t connected with the question, followed by the answer to the question. Participants were then tested two separate times (once immediately after seeing the answers, then again, 24 hours later) on the answers to the trivia questions and the faces. They discovered that when participants’ curiosity was piqued they were far more likely to remember both the answer and the face the popped up right before that answer. The brain scans also revealed increased action in the reward center of the brain during these curiosity spikes, leading researchers to conclude that the link between the hippocampus (the area of the brain that is associated with memory) and the dopamine reward circuit work together to enhance learning capacity.
Thank your vocabulary teacher: If vocab flashcards give you unpleasant flashbacks of angst-filled exams, you can take heart in the fact that those exercises may help save your brain as you age. Scientists from the University of Santiago de Compostela recently examined a group of individuals over 50, some of whom were cognitively healthy and some of whom were experiencing mild cognitive impairment. Those who performed lower on vocabulary tests were far more likely to be cognitively impaired than their word-wise counterparts. Study authors attribute this finding to the fact that a stronger vocabulary indicates a higher amount of cognitive reserve—the biological mechanism that allows the brain to maintain its functionality, despite the onset of Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
Pump some iron: As long as you’re doing the right exercises, twenty minutes in the gym may be all it takes to boost your brainpower, according to a recent study from the Georgia Institute of Technology. First, participants were shown a set of 90 pictures that contained a mixture of positive (kids playing), negative (violence) and neutral (everyday objects) subject matter. Then, one group performed a weight exercise while the other group sat and let a researcher and a machine move their legs in a similar motion, without exerting any physical effort. Two days later, after being shown a set of 180 pictures—90 of which were from the original set, 90 of which were new—the participants who had done the weight exercise remembered 10 percent more images from the original set than the group who had their legs moved for them. Previous research has pointed to the brain benefits of aerobic exercise, but these new findings appear to indicate that weight-based physical activity can also offer cognitive advantages.
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