Listing all of these "techniques" doesn't address the important question: why are they necessary?
Why do you need to apply all of this conscious effort to "strengthen memory" if other people, or yourself previously, could easily remember the plot details of most movies you had watched, names of peoples you had met, etc. without ever having to think about it?
Maybe this is indirectly addressed in the paragraph "Start paying undivided attention to important events and interactions"? The author writes:
> How many times have you walked away from a conversation having no idea what was discussed because you were distracted by your phone? “You can get impoverished memories for past events because you were never really there in the first place,”
Maybe we used to be more "present" in the past, and therefore formed better memories? And now, with constant distractions literally at our fingertips our brains have less and less opportunities to form "sharp" memories as there is always a distraction pulling us away. And, as time goes by, due to lack of training and/or laziness, our brains actually get worse and worse at forming proper memories even when a distraction-less event is encountered?
I see it like a program. It gets worse over time due to lack or even non-existence of effort/maintenance to make it good. Problem is we don't know how to write said program, we only know what the effect of all past behavior put together is. Is it even changeable later in life, or is it hardcoded now after enough of certain interactions having burnt it into the disk => requiring permanent workarounds and effort.
> Why do you need to apply all of this conscious effort to "strengthen memory" if other people, or yourself previously, could easily remember the plot details of most movies you had watched, names of peoples you had met, etc. without ever having to think about it?
Why do you have to exercise in your old age when previously, when you were young, you were comparatively fit without trying?
Biology is full of "use it or lose it" because maintaining any ability or skill costs energy.
My guess would be that in previous generations people were not exposed to as much abstract information, nor were they expected to remember it, and if they were expected to remember something there was a social structure or a regular habit which helped. Individuals are responsible for a greater variety of tasks than they used to be, and those tasks are much more abstract, and so it also becomes more difficult to form memories about the details.
My armchair-neuroscientist take: forgetfulness is an evolutionary necessity. If we remembered every detail of our lives (every pebble on every road, ever second of every day) then we would reach our brain’s total capacity in a single day, and it would take enormous amounts of calories to preserve all that information. So every living creature forgets.
Once we reach maturity evolution basically stops “caring about us” (that is an anthropomorphism)- our systems are left “on maintenance mode”, which in evolution’s case means “luck”. Some fortunate souls might preserve their natural memories until they reach 70 or 80, but most people don’t, and for some the “maintenance mode” comes super early, because biology isn’t exact.
That said, I also think that nature is part of it but nurture also plays a role. The human brain is incredibly flexible. You can partially overcome or at least delay the worst of your memory loses with the right environment, and you can also squander your natural gifts and succumb early with the wrong one.
Those people actually do think about "it", but they have thought about it in a more useful way forever, so they wouldn't notice the difference now.
People also develop the mental infrastructure to index particular kinds of information. Part of it is luck, part of it may be genetics but most of it is training. For example chess masters can easily remember chess games. Musicians can easily remember musical sheets. And some version of this is going on in most people.
For example I can learn new Chinese characters relatively quickly, because I already spent years memorizing some.
>People also develop the mental infrastructure to index particular kinds of information. Part of it is luck, part of it may be genetics but most of it is training.
The thing that most people don't realize is that neuroplasticity is competitive, and developing highly specialized abilities in one area actually negatively impacts your abilities elsewhere.
I don't think so. Is there any evidence? Selective maybe in that you choose to spend time on something particular and not something else and then that something else doesn't improve as much. I wouldn't think there is an actual decrease.
I first came across the idea of neuroplasticity being competitive when reading "The Brain That Changes Itself" back in around 2017.
I spent some time over the Christmas break reading a few books on Neuroscience as the brain is a topic I for some reason keep on coming back to. Among them was "Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory" from Cambridge University Press, and looking it up now in Chapter Three they talk about studies comparing London taxi drivers with controls and noting down differences. To quote the relevant paragraph(s) "they found that taxi drivers had changes in the size of only their hippocampus, with a relative _increase_ in the amount of gray matter within the posterior hippocampus and a relative _decrease_ in the amount of gray matter within the anterior hippocampus. Moreover the changes in both types of hippocampal gray matter correlated with the length of time they had been taxi drivers, which ranged from 1.5 to 42 years (with the largest changes for those who had been taxi drivers the longest.". And also this one: "The investigators also found that the taxi drivers were worse at copying a complex drawing from memory, and a subsequent study from the same group observed the same result and also reported that the taxi drivers were relatively worse than control participants at learning object-place pairs and word pairs (they also reported that the taxi drivers had average IQs). These behavioral deficits may be due to the relatively smaller size of the anterior hippocampus in London taxi drivers. Thus, although the taxi drivers had superior memory for navigating London, it appears to have come at a cost for other forms of memory."
Interesting. But I'd question the link between the anatomical change and the better memory for places. Navigation is not just a memory task.
The idea that size matters in terms of neuroanatomy is problematical. I distinctly recall that there are people missing entire regions of the brain who have no impairment whatsoever.
If you're trying to solve a problem (whether in life or business) and you keep forgetting some of the constraints as well as options then you're not going to come up with a good solution.
Why do you need to apply all of this conscious effort to "strengthen memory" if other people, or yourself previously, could easily remember the plot details of most movies you had watched, names of peoples you had met, etc. without ever having to think about it?