Michelle: I want you to try something right now, wherever you are. Pause for a second and try to draw a U.S. penny from memory. Which way does Lincoln’s profile face? Where does it say ‘In God We Trust’? Is ‘Liberty’ on the left or the right? Mark: Oh, man. I am failing this test spectacularly. I’ve probably handled thousands of pennies in my life, and I have… absolutely no idea. Lincoln is… facing right? Maybe? And ‘Liberty’ is… somewhere. This is embarrassing. Michelle: It feels embarrassing, but it’s the perfect entry point into the book we’re talking about today: Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting by Lisa Genova. Because the reason you can’t draw that penny has almost nothing to do with having a bad memory. Mark: That’s a relief to hear. And Genova is the perfect guide for this journey, isn't she? It's fascinating—she’s not just a bestselling novelist known for her incredibly moving stories about the brain, she's a Harvard-trained neuroscientist. She actually taught neuroanatomy at Harvard Medical School. So she has this rare ability to blend hard science with profound human empathy. Michelle: Exactly. She bridges those two worlds. And that penny experiment, which she highlights in the book, reveals the first, and maybe most important, myth about our memory. The reason we can't draw that penny isn't a memory failure. It's an attention failure. And that's the first huge idea from this book that changes everything.

Mark: Okay, an attention failure. That sounds a little better than my brain just slowly leaking information. What does she mean by that? Michelle: Genova tells this incredibly relatable story about herself. She’s a neuroscientist, remember, an expert on the brain. She was in her mid-forties, scheduled to give a big talk in Cambridge. She was running late, stressed, and she pulls into a massive, multi-level parking garage. She parks the car, grabs her things, and sprints to her engagement. Mark: I can feel the anxiety just hearing this. I know where this is going. Michelle: Of course. The talk goes great, she feels brilliant, and then she walks back into the concrete maze of the parking garage. And her car is gone. She has no idea where she parked it. She walks up and down the ramps, her heart starts pounding, and the thoughts begin to spiral. Mark: Oh, I’ve been there. The immediate jump to, "Is this it? Is this the beginning of the end? Am I losing my mind?" It's a terrifying feeling. Michelle: Exactly. She’s thinking about her family history with dementia, she’s considering reporting the car stolen. She’s in a full-blown panic. After what feels like an eternity, she finally finds her car, right where she left it, in spot 4B. And in that moment of relief, she has this profound insight that becomes a cornerstone of the book. She says, and I’m quoting here because it’s so powerful: "I couldn’t find my car, not because I had a horrible memory, amnesia, dementia, or Alzheimer’s. I couldn’t find my car, because I never paid attention to where I had parked it in the first place." Mark: Wow. So basically, you can't retrieve a memory that was never created. Her brain was so focused on the upcoming talk, the stress, the rush—it never actually performed the step of encoding the location. Michelle: Precisely. Her eyes saw the "4B" on the wall, her ears might have heard the ding of the elevator, but because her attention wasn't there, the information was never handed off to the hippocampus—the brain's "memory weaver," as she calls it—to be consolidated into a lasting memory. It was just sensory data that vanished in seconds. Mark: That makes so much sense. It’s like when you meet someone at a party. They say, "Hi, I'm Bob," but you're so busy thinking about what you're going to say next, or looking for your friend, that the name just goes in one ear and out the other. You didn't forget Bob's name; you never even heard it, in a memory sense. Michelle: You never encoded it. And this applies to so many of our daily frustrations. Where did I put my phone? Did I lock the front door? Did I take my vitamins this morning? Genova argues that the number one reason for these lapses is a lack of attention. Our brains are on autopilot for these routine tasks. Mark: So the solution isn't to get a "better" memory, but to get better at paying attention in those key moments. To consciously switch off autopilot. Michelle: That's the first step. She says, "If we want to remember something, above all else, we need to notice what is going on." It's an active process. Repetition helps, but you have to create the memory first. You can drive over the same bridge every day for a year, but if you're not paying attention, you won't remember the journey. Mark: Okay, so a lot of what I thought was forgetting is just not paying attention. I can accept that. It’s actually empowering. But what about the things we know we remember? The big, emotional, life-defining moments. Surely those are safe? Genova has some pretty wild claims about those too, right?

Michelle: That’s where things get even more interesting, and maybe a little unsettling. The book's second major insight is that our memories for what happened are, to put it bluntly, wrong. Mark: Wait, hold on. Are you seriously telling me that my memory of my own wedding, something I've replayed in my head a thousand times, is probably full of errors? That feels… wrong. Michelle: It feels wrong because we think of memory as a video camera, faithfully recording events. Genova says this is a fundamental misconception. Memory isn’t a recording; it’s a reconstruction. It’s not a courtroom stenographer reading back the transcript; it's more like a storyteller, weaving a narrative. And every time you tell that story, you change it a little. Mark: A storyteller? So my brain is basically an unreliable narrator of my own life? Michelle: In a way, yes. And there's fascinating research to back this up. One of the most famous studies she cites is about a car accident. Researchers showed participants a video of a car crash. Afterward, they asked them a simple question: "About how fast were the cars going when they [verb] each other?" Mark: Okay, and they changed the verb? Michelle: Exactly. For one group, the verb was "contacted." For another, it was "hit." For a third, "bumped." And for the last group, the verb was "smashed." Mark: I have a feeling the "smashed" group remembered things a bit differently. Michelle: Dramatically so. The group that heard the word "smashed" estimated the cars were going about 41 miles per hour. The group that heard "contacted" estimated the speed at only 32 miles per hour. The language used to ask the question literally changed their memory of the event. Mark: That is wild. But it gets worse, doesn't it? Michelle: It does. A week later, the researchers called everyone back and asked a new question: "Did you see any broken glass in the video?" There was no broken glass in the original film. But in the group that had been primed with the word "smashed," 32 percent—nearly a third—confidently remembered seeing broken glass that never existed. Mark: That's terrifying. It means our memories are incredibly suggestible. It’s not just that we forget details; our brains actively invent them to fit a narrative. Michelle: And this happens at every stage. During encoding, we only capture what we pay attention to. During consolidation, the memory is vulnerable to our imagination, our biases, what other people tell us. And most critically, during retrieval. Each time you pull up a memory, it becomes malleable again. It's like opening a Word document. You can make edits, and when you hit "save"—or in the brain's case, when the memory is reconsolidated—that new version replaces the old one. The original is gone forever. Mark: So every time I tell my wedding story, I'm not just recalling it, I'm potentially re-writing it. That explains why my wife and I have completely different memories of the same events! Michelle: It’s almost guaranteed you do. And this has huge real-world implications. Genova points to the work of the Innocence Project, which has used DNA evidence to exonerate hundreds of wrongfully convicted people. In about 75 percent of those cases, the conviction was based on faulty eyewitness testimony. People were 100 percent confident in their memory, and 100 percent wrong. Mark: That’s a sobering thought. It makes you question everything. If our memories are so flawed, what are we left with? Michelle: And that leads to the most paradoxical and, I think, most beautiful part of the book. If you think having an unreliable memory is unsettling, Genova presents an even more radical idea: a perfect, unerring memory would be a living nightmare. Forgetting isn't a flaw; it's a feature.

Mark: A feature? How can forgetting be a good thing? It feels like a bug in the system. Michelle: To understand that, you have to hear the story of Solomon Shereshevsky, a Russian journalist studied for over 30 years by the psychologist Alexander Luria. Shereshevsky was, for all intents and purposes, a man who could not forget. Mark: That sounds like a superpower. I'd love to have that. Michelle: You think you would. Shereshevsky could memorize incredibly long, random strings of numbers, complex mathematical formulas, and entire poems in foreign languages he didn't speak, and recall them perfectly years later. His memory was practically infinite. But it was a curse. Mark: How so? Michelle: Because he couldn't filter anything. His mind was a constant, overwhelming flood of information. If he was reading a story, every word would trigger a cascade of personal memories and sensory details—sights, sounds, tastes—that would completely derail him from understanding the plot. He couldn't grasp abstract concepts because his mind was cluttered with concrete, irrelevant details. Mark: Wow. So his brain was like a computer with no delete key. It just got clogged with useless data. Michelle: Exactly. He even had trouble recognizing faces, because a person's expression from a moment ago would be just as vivid in his mind as their expression right now. He couldn't prioritize. He couldn't generalize. He couldn't forget. And it made his life incredibly difficult. He tried desperately to learn how to forget, even imagining writing things on a blackboard and then mentally erasing them. Mark: That completely flips the script on what we think of as a 'good' memory. It reframes forgetting as a form of mental hygiene. Michelle: That's the perfect way to put it. Forgetting is essential for us to function. We need to forget where we parked our car yesterday so we can find it today. We need to forget our old password to learn the new one. An intelligent memory system, Genova argues, is one that actively forgets what is no longer useful. Mark: And it’s not just about practical things like passwords. There’s an emotional component too, right? Forgetting helps us heal. Michelle: Absolutely. Time heals all wounds, as the saying goes, because of the erosion of memory. If you go through a painful breakup or lose a loved one, the intense, sharp pain of that memory fades over time. The memory trace weakens. You don't forget the event happened, but you forget the visceral, moment-to-moment agony. If you didn't, you'd be trapped in that trauma forever. Forgetting allows you to move forward. Mark: So there's an art to it. We spend so much time and energy trying to remember things, but maybe we should also be practicing the art of letting things go. Michelle: Precisely. It's a balance. We need to remember what is meaningful, what shapes our identity, what connects us to others. But we also need to let go of the trivial, the painful, and the outdated.

Mark: So after all this, what's the big takeaway? It feels like a paradox. Our memory is this flawed, unreliable storyteller, but it's also the very thing that makes us who we are. Should we trust it or not? Michelle: I think Genova's ultimate point is that we should have a new, more compassionate relationship with our memory. It's not about a simple binary of trust or distrust. It's about understanding. Understand that when you forget your keys, it's likely an attention problem, not a brain tumor. So be kind to yourself. Mark: And when my memory of a past event differs from someone else's? Michelle: Understand that both of you are probably remembering a slightly fictionalized version of the truth, edited by your own experiences and emotions. So be forgiving of others. The goal isn't to have a perfect, computer-like memory. The goal is to use our memory for what matters. Mark: Which is what, in the end? Michelle: Connection. Meaning. Love. Genova ends the book with powerful stories of people with Alzheimer's, including her own grandmother. Even when their episodic memory—the memory of 'what happened'—is gone, their emotional memory often remains. Her grandmother didn't know her daughter's name, but she knew she was loved by her. She felt that connection. And that's the deepest truth of the book. Mark: Wow. "You are more than what you can remember." That’s a powerful thought. Michelle: It is. So the one thing listeners can do today isn't to download a brain-training app or try to memorize a deck of cards. It's much simpler. Mark: Just pay more attention? Michelle: Exactly. The next time you put down your keys, or your phone, or when someone tells you their name, just take one extra, conscious second to notice. Be present in that moment. That single second of attention is the most powerful memory tool you have. Mark: I can do that. It’s a simple, profound shift. A great place to start. Michelle: This is Aibrary, signing off.