Forgetting names, losing track of what you have read and struggling to recall information can make it feel as though your memory simply isn’t very good. But memory is not entirely fixed. Some of the most effective ways to remember more are surprisingly simple.
You finish a book and, a week later, struggle to explain what it was about. Someone introduces themselves at a party and their name disappears almost immediately. You open another browser tab and suddenly forget what you were looking for.
It is easy to interpret these moments as evidence of a bad memory. Yet remembering is not simply a matter of having a brain that stores information well. It also depends on whether you were paying attention when the information arrived, how you processed it, how often you retrieved it afterwards and even what happened while you slept.
The useful part is that many of those things can be changed.
Pay attention before trying to remember
One of the simplest explanations for forgetting is that the information was never properly encoded in the first place.
Consider meeting someone while simultaneously thinking about what you are going to say next. You hear their name, but your attention is elsewhere. Twenty seconds later, the name seems to have vanished. In reality, the problem may have begun before you ever tried to retrieve it.
The same thing happens when we read while checking messages, watch something with another screen in our hands or listen to a conversation while mentally preparing an email.
Memory starts with attention. If something matters, give it a few uninterrupted seconds. With a name, repeat it naturally during the conversation. With something you are reading, occasionally stop and ask yourself what you have just learned.
Remembering becomes considerably harder when you were only half-present in the first place.
Stop rereading and start retrieving
This is one of the most useful findings from research on learning.
When people want to remember something, they often read it again. The second reading feels easier because the material has become familiar, and that familiarity can create the impression that we know it.
But recognising information when it is sitting in front of you is not the same as being able to retrieve it when it isn’t.
Research on learning techniques has consistently identified practice testing, or actively retrieving information from memory, as a particularly effective strategy. Instead of reading the same page for a third time, close the book and try to explain the central idea without looking.
This works outside exams, too.
After a meeting, try recalling the three most important points before checking your notes. After reading an article, explain it to someone else. When learning someone’s name, attempt to retrieve it later rather than repeatedly looking at their contact details.
The slight difficulty is part of the point. Your memory gets practice at doing the thing you eventually need it to do: finding the information again.
Space out what you want to remember
Cramming can get information into your head quickly. Keeping it there is another matter.
A large body of learning research supports distributed practice; returning to information over time rather than concentrating all your study into one session.
Imagine you want to remember some useful phrases in another language. Reviewing them for an hour tonight may feel productive, but shorter sessions spread across several days are generally better suited to long-term retention.
More recent experimental research has continued to find benefits when retrieval itself is spaced across learning sessions.
You don’t need a complicated schedule. Learn something today, try to retrieve it tomorrow, return to it several days later and revisit it again later. As recall becomes easier, the gaps can become longer.
For anything you genuinely want to remember, encountering it once is rarely enough.
Connect new information to something you already know
Memory becomes easier when information has somewhere to go.
Suppose someone tells you they grew up in Lisbon. Rather than storing “Lisbon” as an isolated fact, you might connect it to your own trip to Portugal, a restaurant you visited there or something you know about the city.
The same principle can be used when learning more complicated material. Ask: What does this remind me of? Why does this make sense? How does it connect with something I already understand?
The more meaning you give information, the more potential routes you create for finding it again.
This is one reason understanding usually beats memorising words mechanically. You aren’t simply trying to preserve a sentence. You are fitting an idea into a larger network of knowledge.
Use memory tricks when they actually help
Mnemonics can sound slightly childish until you realise how effective a strange mental image can be.
If you meet someone called Rose, for example, imagining an enormous rose growing from her shoulder is ridiculous—which is precisely why you may remember it.
The classic method of loci, sometimes called a memory palace, goes further. You imagine a familiar location and mentally place pieces of information at different points along a route. To retrieve them, you mentally walk through that location again.
Techniques like these can be useful when you need to remember specific information. However, they are tools rather than evidence that you have somehow upgraded your entire memory.
For everyday life, simpler strategies—attention, association, retrieval and repetition—are often enough.
Sleep on it
Sleep doesn’t simply give your brain a break from learning. It plays an important role in what happens to memories after they are formed.
Reviews of the evidence indicate that sleep supports memory consolidation, particularly for certain forms of declarative information, the facts and experiences we can consciously recall.
That means staying up for several extra hours to squeeze in more learning can be counterproductive if it comes at the expense of adequate sleep.
It also helps explain why something difficult can occasionally seem clearer the following morning. Learning doesn’t necessarily stop when you close the book.
If remembering something matters, sleep should be considered part of the process rather than time taken away from it.
Exercise is good for your brain too
Exercise is usually discussed in terms of cardiovascular health, strength or weight. Its relationship with cognition is increasingly difficult to ignore.
A large 2025 umbrella review combined evidence from 133 systematic reviews covering more than 258,000 participants. Overall, exercise was associated with improvements in general cognition, memory and executive function, although effects varied between groups and types of exercise.
That doesn’t mean going for a run will suddenly give you photographic memory. It does mean that regular physical activity belongs in a conversation about maintaining cognitive health.
There is also research suggesting that individual bouts of cardiovascular exercise can influence aspects of memory consolidation, although much of that work concerns particular forms of learning rather than everyday memory in general.
The bigger point is less exciting but more useful: the habits that support the rest of your body also tend to matter for your brain.
Don’t expect too much from brain-training apps
The promise is appealing: spend a few minutes each day playing memory games and become noticeably sharper in everyday life.
The evidence is more complicated.
Training can make people better at particular working-memory tasks. A recent synthesis of meta-analyses in healthy adults found a small improvement in working memory following training. However, the researchers cautioned that the practical effect on real-world cognition may be limited.
Other reviews have similarly found that improvements often don’t transfer very far beyond tasks resembling the ones people practised. Research on commercially available brain-training programmes has not established convincing broad improvements in everyday memory.
There is nothing wrong with doing a memory puzzle because you enjoy it. Just don’t assume that becoming excellent at a particular brain game automatically means you’ll stop forgetting people’s names.
Make information distinctive
Think about yesterday. You probably don’t remember every cup of coffee, doorway you walked through or sentence you read.
That’s not a malfunction. Forgetting is part of how memory works. Your brain does not preserve every detail of your day with equal importance.
So when something genuinely matters, make it stand out.
Say a person’s name aloud. Attach a strange visual image to a fact. Put information into your own words. Tell somebody what you learned. Connect it with a story. Test yourself on it tomorrow.
In other words, interact with information rather than simply exposing yourself to it.
The best way to improve your memory
There is no single exercise that transforms memory overnight. Nor is remembering everything necessarily the goal.
A more realistic approach is to become better at encoding important information and retrieving it when you need it.
Pay attention when something first arrives. Connect it to knowledge you already have. Test yourself rather than endlessly rereading. Return to important information after increasing gaps of time. Sleep properly, stay physically active and be sceptical of products promising a dramatically upgraded brain.
Perhaps most importantly, stop assuming every forgotten name or misplaced thought means your memory is failing.
Memory is selective. But when something really matters, the way you learn it can make a considerable difference to whether it is still there when you go looking for it.
Further Reading
How to Become Mentally Stronger
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