Understand & Improve Memory Using Science-Based Tools

Anything that increases adrenaline will increase learning & memory and will reduce the number of repetitions required to learn something... provided that spike in adrenaline occurs late in the learning or immediately after. And anything that reduces epinephrine and adrenaline will impair learning.

There are not one, not dozens, but as I mentioned before, hundreds of studies in animals and in humans that point to the fact that triggering the increase of adrenaline late in learning or immediately after learning is going to be most beneficial if your goal is to retain that information for some period of time and to reduce the number of repetitions required in order to learn that information.

It's not the absolute amount of adrenaline that you release in your brain and body that matters for enhancing memory; it's the amount of adrenaline that you release relative to the amount of adrenaline that was in your system just prior, particularly in the hour or two prior ... So, if you're going to chronically increase adrenaline, you're not going to learn as well. The real key is to have adrenaline modestly low, perhaps even just as much as you need in order to be able to focus on something, pay attention to it, and then spike it afterwards.

It is the presence of high adrenaline, high amounts of norepinephrine and epinephrine, and perhaps cortisol as well as you'll soon see that allows a memory to be stamped down quickly. It is not the emotion; it is the neurochemical state that you go into as a consequence of the emotion.

Brief naps of about 20 to up to 90 minutes some period of time after an attempt to learn can enhance the rate of learning and memory.

Cardiovascular exercise seems to increase what we call dentate gyrus neurogenesis. Neurogenesis is the creation of new neurons. The dentate gyrus is a sub-region of the hippocampus that's involved in learning and memory of particular kinds...

Wendy Suzuki's lab has done really beautiful experiments where they have people exercise... and what they find is that at least as late as two hours after that exercise, there is an enhancement in learning and memory.

Basically what they found was that if people take pictures of things and they choose which things they are taking pictures of... that there is enhanced memory for those objects later on. However, it degraded their ability to remember auditory information.

Nowadays, we hear a lot about how memories are the consequence of new neurons added in the brain or that every time you learn something, a new connection in your brain forms. Well, sorry to break it to you, but that's simply not the case ... Most of the time, when we learn something, it's because existing neurons, not new neurons, but existing neurons strengthen their connection through co-activation over and over and over through repetition or—and this is a very important or—or through very strong activation once and only once.

The way memory works is that each individual thing that we remember or that we want to remember is linked to something by either a close, a medium, or a very distant association.