What are memories?

Your brain discards more than half of what you experience within 24 hours. It’s not broken—it’s designed this way. But decades of memory research reveal exactly how to preserve what matters most before it’s gone forever. So what are memories? This article may help in your understanding.

Table of Contents

• 1. Introduction: The Proust Effect
• 2. The External Mind: Writing, Photos, Diaries
• 3. Because What’s Not Recorded Is Lost
• 4. Triggering the Forgotten
• 5. When Memory Fails Us
• 6. How to Preserve Your Memories

“Remember this moment.”

It’s advice we give to ourselves when some sight, sound, or smell reaches deep inside. In Marcel Proust’s famous “madeleine” episode, a bite of tea-soaked cake unleashes years of childhood scenes: “at the very instant…the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me.”

Modern neuroscience explains why. Odors and tastes travel straight to the hippocampus and amygdala – the brain’s memory and emotion centers. As one expert notes, “smell and emotion are stored as one memory.” In that Proustian moment, a simple smell triggers a cascade of neural connections, flooding the mind with rich detail. But for every vivid flash, thousands of details vanish. That’s the paradox of memory: it only survives if we help it.

Scientists now see memories not as static files in a brain hard drive, but as dynamic patterns of neuronal connections. As Johns Hopkins researcher Rick Huganir puts it, “Memories are who we are” – yet making them is purely biological. Learning a name or event literally wires a new circuit between neurons. The more we recall or rehearse that information, the stronger the synaptic connection grows; if we neglect it, the connection weakens and the memory fades. In effect, our brains are never storing “everything” – they triage. The Cleveland Clinic explains: “Your brain selects the most important memories to keep” and lets the rest go. It’s as if the brain has limited hard-drive space, choosing highlights to keep and discarding the rest. Classical experiments (the “forgetting curve”) confirm we can lose more than half of new information in a day without review.

The External Mind: Writing, Photos, Diaries

Humans have long fought biological forgetting by offloading memory into the world. From Paleolithic cave paintings to Victorian diaries, we create records outside our heads so we don’t lose track. Psychologists call this the extended mind: tools in our environment that “support cognition.” A 2021 review notes that diarists and photographers are simply continuing an ancient practice – now on smartphones. Today, personal photo libraries can number in the tens of thousands, with some 350 million images uploaded to Facebook every day. Each photo or diary entry is a tiny memory anchor. But it only works if we truly engage with it. The same authors warn: creating a record is just step one. If you take a photo or scribble a note and then forget it, “the process can end there” and the memory is effectively lost.

This dynamic is easier to grasp with classroom analogies. Recent studies tested how note-taking vs photo-taking affects memory. As Maribeth Trego and colleagues describe, students who merely snapped lecture slides later recalled less than those who took traditional notes. In fact, “most research shows that photo taking impairs memory” of what was captured. Why? Likely because writing forces us to process and summarize information, while a camera encourages mindless snapping. Neuroscience confirms this: in one experiment, students writing by hand showed high brain activity across motor, visual, and sensory regions – much more than typists. Handwriting literally weaves movements with vision: writing the shape of an “A” is a very different hand motion than a “B,” which strengthens the memory trace. Conversely, clicking a photo often triggers cognitive “offloading” – you hand responsibility to your device and disengage. Indeed, even when people knew their photos wouldn’t be reviewed (so no benefit to offloading), the memory gap persisted, suggesting the act of photographing itself breaks concentration.

Over a half-century of research has found a clear rule: write it out, or it slips out. Writing by hand is not quaint busywork; it’s a powerful memory tool. Recent frontiers of psychology show that anything tangible – writing, drawing, even building – dramatically boosts recall. Participants asked to draw or act out vocabulary words remembered them far better than those who did not. Similarly, a 2023 diary study showed that people who drew daily events in a journal later recalled those events with much richer accuracy than if they had just written them in words. In short, transforming fleeting experience into ink on paper deepens the neural imprint.

What’s Not Recorded Is Lost

The upshot is stark: if it’s not recorded, it is lost. We have empirical proof. Simply writing things down changes our memory for the better. Children who learn letters by hand recognize them longer; adults who handwrite lecture notes grasp concepts better than typists. On the flip side, research also tells us that relying on photos alone is risky. As Trego’s team notes, the photo-taking impairment is robust: memory for a photographed object is “worse than for the same object viewed without photographing.” In one experiment, students who only photographed slides remembered significantly less content than those who wrote notes. A camera capturing all details sounds perfect, but it often short-circuits attention.

This is true beyond the classroom. Even in daily life, simply reviewing a photo later isn’t the same as encoding it in the moment. A retrospective analysis calls for a “framework for preserving memories” that goes beyond the snapshot. It advises four steps: Recording (take the note/photo), then Curating (edit or tag it), Reviewing (actually look back at it), and Sharing it. Neglect any step, and the memory dwindles. For example, dropping a printed photo strip or tearing out a diary page throws that record away. By contrast, actively curating – like a scrapbook or blog – reinforces the memory. We literally become the curators of our own mind’s museum.

Memory scientists often underscore the stakes: our brains truly are unreliable recorders. As the Cleveland Clinic notes, our brains “select” what to keep, often forgetting details or entire days. We might remember the punchline of a story but not who told it. We remember a vacation but not the exact playlist of the drive. This forgetting is not a flaw – it’s how the brain manages information – but it means much of life can vanish unless captured. Studies of context-dependent recall show that without anchors (like names or smells), even the strongest memory can stay locked away. On memory and forgetting, technology should humble us: decades ago, unrecorded moments simply died. Today’s digital devices postpone oblivion, but only superficially. Bits can corrupt, formats go obsolete, accounts get deleted – entire troves of “memories” may disappear overnight. By contrast, a handwritten notebook or photo album sits on a shelf, unchanging.

Triggering the Forgotten

We each carry a library of buried memories. To access them, we rely on triggers – cues that unlock what we’ve nearly lost. Proust’s cake is a literary archetype, but everyday examples abound: a particular song transports you to high school, the scent of vanilla reminds you of holidays past, or stepping into an old classroom floods back the crush of childhood. Brain anatomy explains why: odors and sounds feed directly into memory circuits. When one Harvard researcher notes, “Smell and emotion are stored as one memory,” he’s encapsulating why a single whiff can resurrect whole scenes. In fact, studies show smell is better than words at cueing autobiographical memory (the so-called “Proust effect”). A baby’s nursery scent can whisk us a lifetime backward, because the olfactory bulb dumps signals immediately into the hippocampus and amygdala.

We see triggers in action when revisiting old places. Geographer and memory researcher David Lowenthal noted that returning to one’s childhood home – even as it physically decays – can vividly revive memories simply by context. The mind binds memories to time and place: walk in now, and pieces of the past reassemble. Music has a similar power. (Consider how your grandmother’s favorite song can momentarily dissolve her illness, letting her sing every word from youth.) Psychologists call this the involuntary memory phenomenon. We rarely summon memories at will; instead they capture us when the external world aligns. Thus the implication: to hold onto what we live, we must capture more of the context now. Writing down the who, what, and where embeds that context in the record.

Memory Fails Us

Worry about memory loss is widespread, especially as news of dementia research grows. We fear that our minds will betray us. But even those already struggling with decline often cope better than we expect – if they have good supports. In memory clinics, families create “memory books” for loved ones with Alzheimer’s: albums of photos each with a simple caption (name, place, event). Research shows these books really help. A practical guide explains that for a person with dementia, a memory book “help[s] preserve memories…and stimulate long-term memory.” Each caption is written in first person, anchoring the who/when/where of the image. These books let patients repeatedly re-experience positive cues: each page “evokes emotions to help recall more memories.” In other words, structures that would be mundane for us – labeling a photo “1974 – me on my first day of school” – become lifesavers when memory fluctuates. The irony is stark: those already diagnosed with memory problems are encouraged to externalize their memory aggressively, because the internal hardware is failing. Meanwhile, the rest of us rarely do so.

Memory does naturally ebb and flow. Factors like stress, illness, or sleep deprivation can make today’s memory fuzzier than yesterday’s. (Ever lost your keys on a hectic day, then found them an hour later when relaxed?) Yet relying on “fortune” for recall is misguided. The same research that highlights memory’s selectiveness also offers a remedy: rehearsal and retrieval strengthen memories. In practice, that means reviewing what we’ve recorded. Re-reading an old entry, or even sharing a story with a friend, re-consolidates the memory trace. Recall isn’t a one-shot event. The memory reconsolidation literature shows that revisiting a memory – whether by discussion or by looking at a journal – reinforces it. This is why psychologists emphasize a loop of record, curate, review. Without that loop, even a well-written diary entry can fade: it must be revisited to stay alive.

How to Preserve Your Memories

Given what science tells us, the prescription is clear. We should treat our memories like valuable artifacts. Instead of trusting our cloud to mind our mind, let’s externalize intentionally. In practice, that means:

Write it down by hand. Use pen and paper (or stylus) for notes and diaries. Studies consistently find handwriting yields stronger memory traces than typing or just taking photos. Even sketching your thoughts helps: drawing in a diary led study participants to recall events with far greater accuracy than writing alone.

Narrate your photos. Every snapshot deserves a caption. Write the names, date, location and why this moment mattered. Dementia caregivers know the value: including the “person, place, and event” on a photo page boosts recall even when the picture alone is meaningless. Treat your images like museum exhibits with plaques.

Keep a simple journal or scrapbook. Don’t rely on ephemeral stories told only in your head. Even bullet points or keywords about the day help cement memories. The mere act of encoding an experience into text or drawing recruits more of your brain than passively living it.

Review and share. Periodically go back through your records. This reflection is crucial: re-reading notes or sharing stories refreshes the neural patterns (psychologists call this retrieval practice). One model calls it “curation”: we sort and revisit our memory objects like museum curators. Share stories with family and friends – their questions and reactions will cue forgotten details.

Use all your senses. Actively note smells, sounds, tastes. These often make the strongest cues. If you keep a written account of an event, mention the music playing, the weather, the scents in the air. Science tells us these sensory details bind tightly in memory. So when you revisit, that olfactory or auditory cue can unlock what was buried.

Choose analog when possible. Our smartphones are great, but try writing a letter, crafting a handwritten note, or using a real notebook for important memories. A physical artifact can outlive an app. A century from now, a lost diary might be rediscovered intact; a lost cloud backup likely will not.

With diligence, you turn each experience into enduring knowledge. If you follow this regimen, you won’t just hope to remember – you will store each detail with purpose. In the end, memories are fragile until we memorialize them. By writing everything down and curating our personal archives, we ensure that the story of our lives isn’t written off by forgetfulness.

In the age of fleeting digital images, the old wisdom holds: if it’s not recorded, it is lost. Let us treat our memories with the care they deserve – write them out, share them, and infuse them with context. Because memories aren’t just mental echoes; they are the very plot of our lives. Only by transcribing and nurturing them can we ensure they echo through time.

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For additional information check out Broken English Books’ “Behind The Screenplay” feature about “Memories Come.”

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