LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: If you want to strengthen your mind, a new compendium exploring the mechanics of memory may be the place to start

IT IS all too easy to forget how much we rely on our memory and how quickly things can go south when it falters. Although the march towards forgetfulness is often presented as a foregone conclusion, it doesn’t have to be that way. That’s according to Dr Richard Restak in The Complete Guide to Memory, a short but comprehensive compendium of everything we know about memory and how we might improve it.

So-called brain training has been in vogue for decades in the form of sudoku puzzles or apps that promise to help you defy the cognitive decline of ageing, but there is little evidence for this.

Despite his book’s subtitle – The science of strengthening your mind – Dr Restak’s gambit is slightly different. He is a neuroscientist, author of more than 20 books on the human brain, and with decades of experience of patients with memory problems. Here he argues that by performing certain tasks to boost your memory, other mental faculties that rely on it will improve and you might ease the impact of old age.

Of course, memory isn’t one thing, but an interconnected series of brain structures and processes that interact with stimuli and consciousness in myriad ways. To understand how to improve it, an understanding of these processes is helpful, so Restak devotes a sizeable chunk of this book to teasing out the nuances of memory.

This includes episodic, semantic and procedural memory, how working and long-term memory differ, and how these are, in turn, formed from different stimuli, such as internal and external speech or visual information. It can feel like a whirlwind tour, and unless you take Restak’s advice to be attentive and intentional about remembering, the neuroscience will likely wash over you.

But understanding how different kinds of memories are made and stored does help make sense of the sections that follow, on how our brains use memory in daily life and what happens when these processes falter or start to go wrong.

The book is at its most enjoyable when Restak blends case study and personal anecdote to explore memory and what happens when faculties start to disengage.

Somewhat distressingly, the chapter devoted to memory’s malfunctions is almost as five times as long as the chapter that describes it working as intended – but, apart from rare brain injuries or traumatic events, these cognitive vulnerabilities are instructive.

For instance, knowing that advertisers and political campaigners tend to recycle and repeat the same catchphrases to evoke a sense of familiarity, and so prime you to remember them, could fortify you against manipulation in the future – or encourage you to use those same repetitious techniques for things you would like to remember.

The main way to improve all forms of memory, the author says, is to actively practise certain techniques, ideally daily. Some are as simple as attending to things more closely to expand long-term memory, while others are more involved, such as exercises and games that include memorising sequences of cards or numbers to boost working memory.

For all its emphasis on brain structure, the guide can feel frustratingly unstructured. Some curiosities, like the brain’s tendency to more easily recall interrupted tasks (the Zeigarnik effect) or that you remember things better when you see them on large screens, seem random and underexplored, with only a few paragraphs devoted to each and little about how you should incorporate them into your life.

Then there are its more eye-catching claims – for example, that memory exercises could help prevent memory decline in Alzheimer’s disease. Some might say that these rely too much on Dr Restak’s clinical experience and suffer from a lack of balanced discussion, essential for a book that has “avoid memory loss” on the cover and mentions Alzheimer’s on the first page.

Critical reviewers will likely still be pondering over the book’s anti-dementia credentials, although a few weeks of the daily memory exercises emphasised may well lead to a small boost in recall and help those who use them to feel more present.

The Complete Guide to Memory by Dr Richard Restak is published by Penguin Life, 208pp