The best memory system may non be the one inside your head. Scientists are learning more every day about the frail nature of memories, including the rather sci-fi fact that they tin be functionally erased. Once yous know that, it might make you wonder just how much you can trust the wet stuff you use every day.

The answer is that you can't actually trust it, unless you actually know how to employ it. So take a moment to reflect on the disquisitional flaws in your onboard wetware–and how to troubleshoot it.

Your temporary storage is more often than not less than ten things

How many things can y'all remember at whatsoever one time? The most-cited number is "7, plus or minus two," every bit George Miller put it in a classic research paper. It was a stab at determining exactly how many things–digits, shapes, names, what accept you–tin be stored in what's called "working retentiveness." Working memory is where your brain puts things that it's holding and processing temporarily. Every bit shortly equally you lot're on to the next thing–conversation, browser tab, street cake–our brain dumps those previous 7 things to work on the next prepare. Some people can store nine things, some people just five, just the big median curve, as Miller saw it at the time, was around 7 items.

Since its publication and spread, the idea of a common number of things for every human has been refuted and moved past. Merely the fact remains that your brain isn't the place to keep anything you can't human activity on very rapidly.

The most accessible way of optimizing your short set of things is to "clamper" those things, or compress many things into unmarried things related to things stored in your long-term retention. It'southward hard to remember a string of letters: FABOTWTRFOSQINGR. It's much easier to remember "Four each from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Instagram." It's why phone numbers are usually broken into iii and iv-digit sequences.

Information technology sounds uncomplicated, goofy, and more like a party fob than a real strategy. Simply as Joshua Foer notes in his book Moonwalking with Einstein, that verbal chunking is the major (and maybe the only) deviation in the thinking of chess grandmasters and the innumerable amateurs. When grandmasters await at a board, they're looking at whole clusters of pawns and compressing them into "structures" and arrangements they know, making whole swaths of the board into single parts of their seven-detail working memory. They could, therefore, call up entire boards at a time on a remarkably consistent basis. Merely show those chess masters random arrangements on a board, and they're only slightly amend at recalling them than brand-new players. Chunking matters.

False memories tin be as strong every bit truthful memories

When something happens that'southward notable and unique, or emotional and stressful, our brain tends to write it to our long-term retention. That's good, only the way information technology'south written can pb to confusion subsequently. It'due south something that police detectives and prosecutors know all too well.

Dr. Caroline Racine, a clinical neuropsychologist at the Academy of California San Francisco, says that our brains organize their neurons around associated features. If you recite a listing of related words to a group–"dream, bed, midnight, tired"–and give information technology some time, most people will report they heard the discussion "slumber" in the list.

"We base many of our retentivity judgements on information that seems familiar, fifty-fifty if we tin't specifically call back detaills from a detail fact or result," Racine wrote in an email. "[Then] if related information is introduced when discussing a detail memory, that information tin can exist co-opted into that previous memory, because neurons that are firing together get wired every bit a specific memory." The more that bundle of neurons is accessed, either for recalling or hearing the story again, the more than real the fake parts will seem, co-ordinate to Racine.

Information technology's the aforementioned principle as to why memories can be "erased," why memoirs are so rife with falsities, and information technology's why you should (hopefully) recollect to cheque your facts and archives, especially on the things you lot think you accept down common cold.

Your mental library has a faulty card catalog

That said, your context-obsessed brain can call up data it learned just a brusk while ago, or sometimes farther dorsum. It simply needs the correct reminder, only more importantly, it needs it at only the right time.

Sunil Vemuri, PhD graduate of the MIT Media Lab, studied the effectiveness of what's called spaced repetition, or feeding someone reminders and hints about something at specific intervals. Information technology powered his personal studying on "personal long-term retentivity aids," and it's what eventually became reQall, an app that works on iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry, but too through electronic mail, IM, voicemail messages, and nearly anywhere you can type or say anything.

"The case we're really driving toward is … having a computer arrangement handle your day-to-day reminders, so your biological retention tin can stay in its optimal state," Vemuri said.

When y'all tin can't recall anything about that guy Ken you met with earlier, and whom you're meeting with over again at 3 p.m., the memory's commonly not lost, Vemuri said. "It's like losing the bill of fare for your retentiveness in a massive card catalog." Vemuri'due south app and other spaced reminders piece of work best past giving you clues nigh that person in staggered intervals leading up to the coming together. Ken is from Dallas. You lot met with Ken final in March, when y'all were in San Francisco. Ken last emailed you one week ago–and, of a sudden, everything nigh that cab ride you lot shared with Ken after the conference comes into focus.

For specific sets of noesis to nail downward, you could turn to wink-bill of fare-like spaced repetition software, or make full out a calendar with specifically spaced reminders. But fifty-fifty if you neglect to call back something crucial, look on the bright side–the event might be so traumatic, y'all'll definitely remember the next time.