The frailty of human memory

Sometimes we fail to remember something because the memory never registered properly in the first place.
You might think that a memory champion who can recall thousands of random words would never forget to pick up a carton of milk from the store.
But that’s not actually the case – absent-mindedness is an entirely different kind of memory failure.
Absent-mindedness means you’re not paying enough attention to the task at hand, so incoming information is either partially encoded or not at all.

Rather than being a sign of cognitive decline, everyday frustrations like forgetting where you put your car keys often mean that your mind is simply somewhere else.
An experiment carried out by the psychologists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrates the extent to which focusing on one thing can lead a person to totally ignore something else. The psychologists had participants watch a video of people passing a basketball, and asked them to count the number of passes.

At some point in the video, a man in a gorilla suit runs onto the court and beats his chest. Astoundingly, when asked how many people had seen something unusual in the video, only half the participants had noticed the man in the gorilla suit!

At other times when we forget something, it isn’t because we haven’t stored the information, but rather because we haven’t set appropriate cues to remind ourselves. The key to remembering to do something is to set up an appropriate cue that both informs and is available.

For instance, it’s not going to be very useful to have a piece of string tied around your finger as a cue to feed the cat if you can’t remember what the string is there to remind you of. Likewise, writing a detailed reminder in a notebook is completely useless if it’s not there to cue you when you need it.

Putting your medication by your toothbrush is a perfect example of an appropriate cue; it’s a clear visual nudge at the time you need it, morning or night!