we need to speak to. We forget key details of a person’s face and feel
foolish when we cannot remember them. This kind of need is the
subject of small advertisements in the mainstream press. There is a
belief somehow that you can acquire a miracle cure or treatment to
improve your memory.
From time to time interesting articles appear about what is
going on in the brain. Recently, for example, most of the British
serious and tabloid press covered the story of how the hippocampus
area of the brain was more developed in London taxi drivers than
in most “ordinary” people. The hippocampus is where certain kinds
of memories are stored and it seems that London taxi drivers,
famous for having “the knowledge”—the names of streets and the
routes to and from anywhere in the city to any other place—had
made so many neural connections in this particular area of their
brain that it had expanded accordingly.
However, harnessing knowledge is not just an issue for taxi
drivers: we all need to be able to do it. Managing knowledge effec-
tively, in business and in your personal life, depends on having at
least a basic understanding of how your memory works and what
you can do to avoid being the kind of person for whom things are
always “on the tip of their tongue.”Understanding how your memory works
Before you attempt to grapple with the science of memory, it is
important to remind yourself that there are two different elements
of what most of us think of as memory:1 Fixing the memory in the first place.
2 Recalling the memory when you need it.What is actually going on in your mind when you are using your
memory is, not surprisingly, extremely complex. Rather than focus-
ing on any one single area, scientists increasingly think that a num-
ber of different ones are involved, often almost simultaneously,
depending on the particular kind of experience. It seems likely that118 Power Up Your Mind