At 24, my memory was declining – this is what saved it

My brain has become a junk drawer. You know the one every house has, full of the I-might-use-that-later crap, where you rummage through 10 cables you probably no longer need to find the one thing you’re looking for every few months. My brain’s full of TikTok sounds I’ll never need, half-remembered celebrity gossip and the lyrics to songs I haven’t heard since 2012. Ask me why I’ve walked into a room, the name of someone I’ve met three times or the birthdays I swear I used to know, and it’s as if someone’s asked me to sit an exam without revising. It wasn’t always like this. In fact, growing up, my mum was so convinced that I had a photographic memory that she had me tested by a doctor. As it turned out, I didn’t, but my memory came in handy throughout childhood. I could recall the names of people I’d met once, the phone numbers of all my family members and, at GCSE, read a textbook and recall the information in an exam without thinking about it. So why, in less than a decade, do I feel as though I’ve lost the ability to remember practically anything? Richard Allen, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Leeds, tells me that what I’m describing is known as cognitive offloading: shifting the mental work involved with thinking and remembering onto something external like a phone. “It can be good if we’re in a rush or we’re having to do tasks quickly but when it comes to simply replacing cognitive operations – the things that we should plausibly be able to do – the question is whether it becomes harmful or not.” Shorts It’s a question that researchers are still exploring. There is evidence, according to Allen, that learning something new, revising and giving yourself a mental challenge is good for supporting brain health. “When we outsource those operations to technology, logically we would expect that to have a negative effect.” Allen doesn’t believe that, at the age of 24, my brain could have deteriorated. He says that during childhood, a person’s short and long-term memory improves and it stabilises in your twenties. “It’s a bit unclear when the decline starts to happen but it’s often earlier than people think. Performance starts to decline from your mid-20s, although it doesn’t become noticeable until later than that.” Vocabulary, for example, improves as we age but retrieving a particular word can become more difficult. That familiar “it’s on the tip of my tongue” feeling can become more common. To find out what was actually going on, Allen recommends a simple online test called Test My Brain for my working memory – which, he explains, is different to short-term memory. “Your short-term memory is basically how you very temporarily hold information but your working memory is the system that achieves this; it’s your ability to hold information briefly, process it, think about it and mentally manipulate it and play around with it.” After taking the eight-minute test, the results do little to reassure me that my brain is anything more than mush. It involves remembering the positions of dots on a grid, the colours of shapes and matching cards across four separate tasks. I score below the reported average in all four, getting 3.53 against an average of 6.1 in the first test, 58.33 against 74.3 in the second, 76.21 against 85.2 in the third and 50 against 72.69 in the final one. Overall, my score is higher than just 20 per cent of people who took the test. Of course, an online test isn’t concrete evidence that my memory is on a downward slope, but I did want to see whether I could improve my score and feel a difference in my day-to-day life. Allen shared some simple lifestyle habits that might improve my brain function. After a month, this is what worked. Brain training “Anything with a mental challenge is a good thing to do,” explains Allen. “If it’s about trying to acquire new knowledge, then try not to offload onto technology. Things built on retrieval practice, like Duolingo for learning new languages, can help people give themself a mental challenge and build up their cognitive reserve.” He also recommended Sudoku and crosswords to challenge the brain and add variety. I turn off my phone notifications and download a few Sudoku apps, starting on the easiest levels and working my way up, trying to beat my previous times. My next step is to buy a paper Sudoku book – spending 30 minutes completing three or four puzzles helps me concentrate on one thing at a time. The competitive element makes it fun and, although it’s just a small change, it gives me a reason to sit with a problem and work it out, rather than reach for my phone for entertainment when I have a moment spare. Socialising A 2017 review of 39 studies into social relationships and cognitive function found associations between social activity and several areas of cognition, including working memory. Although the research isn’t concrete, Allen agrees socialising is valuable for the brain. “Social interaction is really important because it comes with various mental challenges and is positive for wellbeing.” I make more effort to pick up the phone and call my friends rather than defaulting to a text or sending them a funny video and I arrange to meet one who lives nearby for coffee every other Sunday. I also start having phone-free mornings with my fiancé at the weekends and, although it sounds fairly simple, distraction-free conversations make me actually listen rather than half-following a conversation while scrolling. It’s been a lovely reminder to connect in real life. Even if it didn’t improve my memory, or look like a brain-training exercise, it’s a habit I’ll be keeping up. Reading fiction Dr Richard Restak, author of The Complete Guide to Memory, previously told The i Paper that “reading novels provides an especially helpful exercise in working memory”. Fiction is preferred as “non-fiction works are often organised in ways that allow the reader to skip around a bit according to personal interests and previous familiarity with the subject. Fiction, on the other hand, requires the reader to proceed from beginning to end while retaining in working memory the various characters and plot developments.” In four weeks, I read seven novels. It was probably the easiest habit to stick to, as instead of scrolling on my phone before bed, I picked up my book. I challenged myself that once I’d finished book number two, I wrote down what I could remember about the characters and plot from book one, and so on. It gave me a reason to spend time concentrating more on each chapter (I’m known for skipping a few words or pages if I can keep up with the story) and see how much I could recall a few days later. Don’t rely on your phone Actively trying not to offload everything onto my phone makes me realise just how often I do it. When the name of the actor that was in that thing seems lost in my brain, my instinct is to look it up immediately. But why do I need that information? I don’t. Instead, I resisted the urge to reach for Google and sat with the frustration, or accepted that it was going to remain a mystery and that, really, there was no real reason I needed to know. As another challenge, I start calculating my shopping bill in my head as I walk around the supermarket, and see how close I get when I get to the cashier. It feels time-consuming and slightly pointless at first (my phone calculator would work it out much quicker) but there’s something satisfying about getting to the answer myself. I’ve even started keeping a manual spreadsheet for my Christmas gifts and doing the mental arithmetic to work out my budget. The results When I retake the test a month later, my scores are considerably better. My first result is still below average, at 5.04, but the others rise to 91.67, 94.24 and 100, double my previous score in the final task. This time, I scored higher than 90 per cent of people who took the test. Obviously, I could have benefited from being more familiar with the tasks, and a better score on a working-memory test doesn’t automatically translate into remembering important dates, names or why I’ve walked into the kitchen, but it’s an improvement. However, this process has made me more conscious of how often I reach for my phone before giving my brain a chance to find the answer itself and made me more present in my day-to-day life. I’ve enjoyed reading more, having proper conversations and finding ways to challenge myself that don’t involve another screen. I’m not convinced that a few Sudoku puzzles will turn me back into the child who could memorise swathes of geography textbooks, but at the very least I’d like to remember everyone’s birthday without having to check Facebook first.