Sharpen Your Memory

In the early aughts, a group of London cabbies walked into a local hospital to have their heads examined. Scientists wanted a peek at the gray matter in their hippocampi, the part of the brain believed to be responsible for memory.

Turns out, the cabbies had a lot of gray matter, loads more than the average person, and they had “The Knowledge” to thank for that — a grueling series of tests that can take up to four years to complete, and which every London cab driver must pass to get licensed.

To prepare for “The Knowledge,” trainees navigate 25,000 streets in a 6-mile radius, often on a moped with a laminated map clipped to the handlebars. On test day, an examiner might ask a trainee the fastest way to get from, say, the spot where Pink Floyd was founded to A.A. Milne’s boyhood home — without offering a physical address.

The act of memorizing thousands of streets and landmarks to pass what is possibly the world’s most challenging memory test gave the cabbies a greater ability to retain information than the average person. The takeaway for us is that memory works somewhat like a muscle, and there are ways to strengthen it, especially as we age.

Dr. Richard Restak, clinical professor of neurology at The George Washington School of Medicine and Health Sciences, has authored more than 20 books on the brain, and his 2022 book The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind is a practical guide for improving and maintaining a strong memory.

“Everybody now is concentrating on physical fitness, which is fine. But they don’t worry about, or don’t give sufficient attention to, their mental fitness, and the most important thing of all is memory,” says Restak, who is 82. “If you can keep yourself performing normally in regard to memory, you’re more than likely quite far away from any kind of dementia.”

Three stages are involved in forming memory: Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval. But we are not machines, we are humans, so how we can best encode and store and retrieve is to envisage. To imagine. Restak’s work has led him to understand that utilizing the imagination is critical to maintaining a strong memory. If you can imagine it, you can remember it.

It’s not enough to do crossword puzzles and brain teasers (sorry, Wordle). Far better to use imagination to strengthen memory, much like using weights to build muscle. Make a game of stretching that memory muscle. Create stories around items or events you want to remember, the wilder the tale, the better.

“We’re all storytellers, really,” says Restak. “The sillier and more dramatic the story, the better your recall is likely to be.”

Restak has a favorite exercise that involves first taking stock of what’s in your most familiar environment — your neighborhood, for example — then using landmarks from that environment as standing visual cues, upon which you superimpose images of words or items you want to remember.

“I’m in my house. There’s a library down the street. And not far from there is my favorite café,” says Restak. “Each of these foci are used to place things I want to remember.” In this case, the items he wants to remember are from a grocery list. So if he imagines his house with milk pouring out of the chimney, he is signaled that milk is on his list. Then, he imagines the library, where he sees loaves of bread instead of books. He moves on to the café, where he’s being waited on by a huge hot dog. And so on. Establishing ten focal points is recommended.

“Each of these places is a resting place for your thoughts, for what you’re trying to remember,” he says.

The next time Restak tries to commit a grocery list to memory, he might imagine that instead of a hot dog, the waiter is now a sweet potato.

“You need to create a backdrop, a home for these words to exist in,” he says.

Humans have been concerned about maintaining memory ever since the first caveman forgot where he put his keys. And through the millennia, we’ve been constructing models like Restak’s to help us with recall.

In the Middle Ages, Italian philosopher Giulio Camillo conceptualized the “Theater of Memory,” an imaginary semicircular stage that looked out onto seven tiers, which were divided by seven aisles. The theater thus comprised 49 distinct areas, each related to a mythological figure. All knowledge was archived in layers in these spaces and remembered through mental images associated with the mythological figure connected with the space.

Restak’s hot dog waiter and bread-filled library is Camillo’s theater.

“Memory is the art of observation. … All of these systems we’re talking about, there are critics who say that they’re nothing but an elaborate form of observation, stopping and looking at something that you ordinarily wouldn’t spend time looking at,” says Restak. “The point is to improve your memory.”

As we age, we forget. We forget the name of the woman who lives around the corner, the one who walks her two dogs every morning. We forget what that thing is called that vacuums the carpet by itself, so we call it a thingy. And then there’s the thingy that boils water. We even blank on the name of a coworker we’ve known for years. This kind of forgetfulness is common, and insufficient sleep, high stress, high anxiety, or certain medications can exacerbate the problem. It shouldn’t be too much of a worry, unless the forgetting begins to happen with alarming frequency.

Of greater concern to Restak is the Digital Age and its threat to memory strength, as we increasingly outsource our memory to devices. An entire generation has never had to navigate without a GPS, few of us can add sums in our heads anymore, no one has had to remember a phone number in at least 20 years, and friendly arguments over who was in which movie don’t happen anymore, because the information is just a few thumb-clicks away. Info in, info out. Restak encourages us to go ahead and have the argument. “Use your iPhone to find out who was right, not to give you the answer,” says Restak.

In The Complete Guide to Memory, Restak implores us to utilize our creative minds. To use images to create a special world for our memory. This means slowing down, being present, taking the time to commit a thing to memory.

“The art of memory requires mentally transforming abstract concepts into images, and bringing these images alive, as if they were real physical objects,” he writes.

Give to your memory, so it can give back to you.

“The hardest thing is to convince people that these memory methods work. They certainly do,” says Restak. “They’re very easy to do, and it’s very easy to check yourself. It’s something you should do daily.”

Patti McCracken is the author of The Angel Makers: Arsenic, a Midwife, and Modern History’s Most Astonishing Murder Ring (HarperCollins). For more, visit pattimccracken.com.

This article is featured in the May/June 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.