There Is No Such Thing as a ‘Bad Memory,’ Only an Untrained One

You may not become a memory Olympian, but you can train your brain to stop forgetting what matters.

Source: Merlin lightpainting

I’m just about to leave the conversation when someone touches my arm and says, “You must have a good memory.”

I know the person means it as a compliment.

But I sigh.

It is the same feeling a published author must get when she repeatedly hears, “You must have been born with a way with words.”

It sounds like praise, but it is actually an erasure. It ignores the sloppy drafts. It ignores the stack of rejection letters. It ignores the years of practice that shaped their craft.

Calling someone “gifted” with a good memory reflects a common—and false—belief: that remembering is a talent, not a skill.

I used to be the person on the other side of that conversation. I used to think, “I am terrible with numbers,” or “I can’t learn languages.” I thought my brain was incapable of holding onto the things I wanted to keep. That other people are just better with their memory.

But I was wrong.

In reality, I simply hadn’t learned how to do those things yet.

Memory is not a lottery ticket you are born with. It is a muscle. It is trainable. And I don’t mean it is trainable through attention-seeking app-based memory games.

It is trainable through the science of how our brains actually work.

To understand why you don’t need a “gift,” and to understand exactly how you can build this skill yourself, let’s look at the science of learning.

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Once you see learning this way, you can’t unsee it.

I still remember the exact moment it clicked for me, and the anger that came with it. I was lying in bed, reading a passage in one of Barbara Oakley’s excellent books. I read a single paragraph, stopped, and felt heat rise in my chest.

I wasn’t angry at her. I was angry that no one had taught me this before—not in school, not during my bacherlor’s or master’s degree, not in my years as a teacher.

I was angry because so much of what we call “learning”, in classrooms, corporate trainings, edtech apps, ignores how the brain actually works. It feels disrespectful to learners.

So what was in that paragraph? Here’s the gist:

If information does not change the long-term memory, nothing is considered to have been learned.

That means that true learning only happens when information has been moved from working memory into long-term memory.

When you read a book, watch a lecture, or listen to a podcast, those ideas float in working memory—your brain’s tiny, fragile, easily-overloaded bottleneck. It’s a temporary holding place for thoughts and the doorway into long-term memory.

Everything you want to remember, like concepts, skills, languages, chord progressions, formulas, must pass through that doorway.

Which means that improving your memory and improving your learning are the same skill: helping information travel from short-term to long-term memory.

And yes, this looks nothing like how most of us were taught and why this passage made me angry (a productive kind of anger that fueled me to write this newsletter and spread the science of learning insights). Because once you understand this, you get a completely different picture of what effective learning actually feels like, and how it’s different from our current realities.

Most learning environments—whether school, corporate workshops, Udemy courses, or MasterClass videos—still rely on the same outdated model: a single, dense exposure to information, delivered through lectures, videos, or slide decks, with the expectation that understanding will somehow turn into memory. No wonder so many of us still think we have a bad memory.

Luckily the science of learning offers clear directives on how to move information from short-term to long-term memory. Here’s how.

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Moving info from your working to your long-term memory

Here are the key strategies derived from the science of learning to effectively move information from working memory to long-term memory:

1. Get into the desirable diffulty zone

The single most potent mechanism for securing learning in your long-term memory is the act of retrieving it. Rereading a textbook or replaying a lecture feels like learning. It’s easy. It’s comfortable. But your brain doesn’t care—it’s passive, and passive doesn’t stick.

Real learning happens in the desirable difficulty zone: the uncomfortable stretch where your brain has to work to remember.

• Self-quiz: Close the book, cover the screen, and reach into the dark corners of your mind for the answer.

• Space it out: Allowing some time to elapse ensures that a little forgetting occurs, requiring your mind to work harder to reconstruct the learning (the “desirable difficulty”).

• Interleaving: Don’t practice one skill in isolation. Interleave different concepts, problems, or techniques. Your brain has to discriminate between them, which deepenslearning and increases versality and builds flexibility.

2. Build bridges (encoding & linking)

Your Short-Term Memory is a tiny room with a tiny door. When you try to shove everything through at once, you’ll clog the system.

So you want to package information strategically and build connections. Great instructional practices minimize unnecessary cognitive burdens (extraneous load) while maximizing deep processing (germane load).

• Chunk it: Break material into small, manageable units. Learn the chord, not the whole song. Solve the mini-problem, not the entire formula. These “neural chunks” become automatic and free up space in Working Memory for higher-level thinking.

• Elaborate: Don’t just memorize, connect what you learn to what you already know. Rephrase it. Tell a story with it. Link it to an experience, a concept, or a memory. Each link strengthens the web in Long-Term Memory.

• Use metaphors & mnemonics: For abstract or arbitrary facts, give your brain a handle. A vivid image, a memory palace, a metaphor—they become hooks you can grab later.

3. Do nothing (consolidation)

Once information is encoded in WM, strengthening and stabilizing the memory traces (consolidation) requires time, often during periods of rest. Prolonged focus hinders the brain’s ability to offload new material into your long-term memory.

• Take breaks: Short mental breaks are important because they allow the diffuse mode of thinking to creatively consolidate the information worked on during the focused mode.

• Sleep: Learning involves connecting neurons (dendritic spines to axons) in LTM, and this crucial process of consolidation primarily occurs when you are sleeping. Spacing out learning over several days allows for more sleep periods, which strengthens learning and makes those neural connections strong and lasting.

• Reflect: Look back at what you’ve learned. Ask, “What went well?” or “How does this connect to what I learned last week?” Reflection is a combo of retrieval and elaboration hat helps reorganize and stabilize memory traces and strengthens connections in your long-term memory.

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What I want you to take away from this

There is a modern trend to demonize memorization. People argue that in the age of ChatGPT, we don’t need to know things; we just need to know how to find them and focus on higher order skills such as critical thinking, problem-solving, and creation.

But this is a dangerous fallacy.

Avoiding memorization hinders critical thought. Because if you have to look everything up, your Working Memory is entirely consumed by the search. You have no mental bandwidth left to connect ideas, solve complex problems, or be creative.

Complex problem-solving, analysis, synthesis, and creative problem-solving require a sturdy foundation of knowledge. One cannot apply what one knows in a practical manner if one does not know anything to apply.

Therefore, focusing your learning sessions on moving information from short-term to long-term memory, memorizing what you learn, is the prerequisite for intellectual freedom.

When you secure facts in your long-term storage, you release your mental power. You clear the stage of your Working Memory so that the real star of the show—your ability to think, analyze, and create—finally has the room to perform.

That is why I feel that productive anger I mentioned earlier. We have been taught that memory is a static trait. We have been taught that we are stuck with the brain we have.

We aren’t. Memory is not a gift. It is a choice. And now that you know the science, it is a choice you are fully equipped to make.

Sources

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., III, & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Deans for Impact. (2015). The science of learning. Deans for Impact.

Guerriero, S., Le Thu, H., & Chang, G-C. (Eds.). (2024). Insights from the science of learning for education: Leveraging scientific knowledge for innovations in teaching and learning. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Jha, T. (2024). What is the science of learning? Analysis Paper 63. Centre for Independent Studies.

Oakley, B., & Schewe, O. (2021). Learn like a pro: Science-based tools to become better at anything. St. Martin’s Essentials.