4 activities you should be doing to help boost your memory

By MiNDFOOD

4 activities you should be doing to help boost your memory

Everyone has moments of forgetfulness from time to time, especially when life gets busy – but there are natural ways to train your brain to be less forgetful.

While forgetfulness can be a completely normal occurrence, having a poor memory can be frustrating. So, we’ve come up with four evidence-based ways to improve your memory naturally.

Get moving

Ever open a cupboard or walk into a room, and forget what you are there to do? Then it may be time to work on your short-term memory. Research from the British Psychological Society shows 30 minutes of exercise of moderate intensity improves your short-term memory. For the research, healthy and active participants were given lists of words to learn and recall either after or before exercise, or before or after a period of rest. The results showed that, when recalling the words immediately after learning, exercising before learning produced the best results than rest. When asked to wait 30 minutes between learning and recall, exercising before or after learning was better than resting, but the best recall was when participants exercised after learning the words.

Smell rosemary                             

Neurobiologists from the University of Toronto have shown that there is a strong link between memory and olfaction, the process of smelling and recognising odours and that odour-linked memories are often more vivid than other types of memories. The researchers said the link could also explain why the loss of the ability to smell has become recognised as an early symptom of Alzheimer’s Disease. The smell of rosemary, in particular, has been shown be researchers from Northumbria University to enhance memory. The herb has actually been associated with memory for centuries. Even Shakespeare wrote about the herbs memory-enhancing properties with Ophelia saying in Hamlet: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance”.

Sleep tight

Researchers at the University of York have shown how sleep helps us to use our memory in the most flexible and adaptable manner possible by strengthening new and old versions of  the same memory. Professor Gareth Gaskell of York’s Department of Psychology says: “Our study reveals that sleep has a protective effect on memory and facilitates the adaptive updating of memories.”

Limit phone use

Radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) may have adverse effects on the development of memory performance of specific brain regions exposed during mobile phone use, suggests a study published in July 2018 by the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute. The study found that cumulative RF-EMF brain exposure from mobile phone use over one year may have a negative effect on the development of figural memory performance.

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