Like many of us, my memory is not what it used to be. At this point, it is mostly the trivial stuff that eludes me most — the name of that actor in…what was the name of that movie again? With the astronauts?
To help keep my brain from turning into pudding, I do a bunch of word games every morning, as my understanding is that it will help improve my memory. I don’t have any real proof this is working yet, but I am going to keep at them, both for the streaks and also…just in case.

My memory used to be exceptional. I could recall on command almost every issue I worked on, most of the articles I had written, and a good deal of the projects I managed. A few months ago, a photographer I worked with back in the ’90s on EQ magazine texted me three photos of people he was trying to identify. The first two were cover stories and I recalled them pretty quickly, but the last guy was not ringing any bells. I finally had to resort to Google image search, which gave me a name that still did nothing for me.
When I dug through my archives — literally, as I have physical copies of all the magazines I have worked on — I found him. He was also a cover story, but I didn’t remember it. Or anything about that issue.
A few months back, there was a story in the New York Times newsletter about memory — more specifically, the author of the article, Melissa Kirsch, was lamenting being unable to remember the specifics of books she knew she had read. She asked, “If we can’t remember the things we’ve read and watched and even loved, do they still ‘count’?”
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And while this also struck a nerve with my trouble remembering the media I had consumed, be it books, movies, TV shows, or music, I was more worried about my professional forgettings — dropping those lessons learned and stories told into the fog of my past.
Kirsch likened her brain to a computer memory that was getting full. “I can’t count on things to auto-save anymore,” she wrote. “Since I can’t selectively delete stuff the way I would with an actual hard drive, I’m left creating backups in notebooks, mistrusting my own outmoded technology.”
For inspiration, she turned to an essay by author James Collins. She continued: “Collins suspected, as I do, that the books he can’t remember must have had an effect on his brain anyway, that the experience of reading and engaging with the texts must have changed him in some deeper way, leaving ‘a kind of mental radiation — that continues to affect me even if I can’t detect it.’”
I like the idea of that. It is comforting to think that every interaction, every interview, every story told still resides in me and — though beyond the grasp of my memory — still has a say in how I behave now. And the things we learn today that will be forgotten tomorrow will become part of that whole as the cycle continues.
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Wouldn’t you feel better knowing that every job you completed and customer interaction was stored deep in your DNA, able to be accessed unconsciously whenever that data was needed?
I don’t think brains work that way, but I am going to continue to hope that they do.