Exercises to improve your memory: which ones work and which are hype
What working memory is, why it is the first to slip past a certain age, and which exercises are worth doing daily. No miracle promises.
«It went clean out of my head.» «I walk into the kitchen and cannot remember why.» «Someone told me their name ten seconds ago and it is gone.»
Almost nobody who says I want to improve my memory means memorising a list of kings. They mean this other thing: the memory you use while doing something, the one that holds a phone number for the four seconds it takes to write it down. It has a name — working memory — and it is the first one you notice failing.
This article is about what can genuinely be trained and what cannot. Starting with the second, which is the part usually missing.
What to know before starting
There is something the research on cognitive training has repeated fairly consistently: you improve at the task you train, and that gain does not transfer as far as we would like. Do a thousand exercises remembering sequences and you become good at remembering sequences. Whether that helps you remember where you left your keys is much less clear.
So be wary of two kinds of message:
- The one promising to raise your intelligence or «make your brain younger by X years». There is no basis for that.
- The one promising to prevent disease. A puzzle is not a treatment and nobody should sell it as one.
That said, do not throw the baby out with the bathwater. That the effect is not miraculous does not make it zero: keeping your head active with something that forces you to hold and manipulate information is better than not doing it. And above all it is enjoyable, which turns out to be the reason people keep it up over time.
The base exercise: repeating a sequence
The classic working-memory exercise is the simplest there is: someone shows you a sequence and you repeat it.
It looks like a children's game until you reach seven or eight items. There it stops being doable by brute force and you notice your head doing something different: grouping. Instead of holding seven separate things, you hold two groups of three and one of one. That is called chunking and it is, probably, the most useful thing you take from this kind of exercise, because it does work outside: it is what you do when you memorise an account number in blocks.
How to get value from it:
- Do not move up a level until one comes out comfortably. Failing at your limit all the time does not train, it frustrates.
- Look for the grouping deliberately. If the sequence goes up-up-down, hold «two up, one down», not three positions.
- Do not do it with the television on. Working memory and attention are almost the same thing; with background noise you are measuring something else.
At MenteBrillante this is the Memory puzzle: a grid lights up and you repeat it. The grid grows and the sequence lengthens according to your level, so the step up is gradual rather than a wall.
The second: retrieving words
The other gap people notice is not holding, it is finding. The word on the tip of your tongue that will not come.
For that, the good exercises are not about memorising, they are about searching: anagrams, crosswords, guessing a word from partial clues. All of them force you to comb the vocabulary you already have by routes other than the usual one — by the letters, by the definition, by the length — and that combing is exactly the muscle that seizes up.
A crossword is the purest example: the clue gives you a semantic route, the cells give you the length, and the crossings give you individual letters. Three paths to the same word.
The third, and the most underrated: sleep
It is annoying because it is not an exercise and you cannot «do it better» by willpower, but any honest list of how to improve your memory starts here. Consolidating what you learn during the day happens while you sleep. One bad night leaves your working memory worse than a month without doing puzzles.
The same goes for physical exercise and for not being permanently interrupted. They are not eye-catching pieces of advice, but they weigh more than any app.
A realistic routine
If you want something concrete you will not abandon in two weeks:
- Five or ten minutes, not half an hour.
- Mix types: one of sequences, one of words, one of logic. Repeating the same one is what stops paying off soonest.
- At the same time of day, so you do not depend on remembering.
- Move up levels late, once the previous one comes out without suffering.
In short
Working memory can be trained, you notice it, and the effect does not transfer as far as the adverts promise. With that expectation in its proper place, three perfectly good reasons remain for doing it: it is an enjoyable stretch of time, it keeps your head busy with something that is not a passive screen, and some tricks — chunking above all — do stay with you.
If you want to try, the memory, word and logic puzzles are in the web version, free and with nothing to install.