Now where did I put my keys?

Improving your memory is not about remembering more, it’s about remembering better, says neuroscientist Charan Ranganath. And sometimes, less is more.

- PAUL LITTLE

There's a cliché that doctors at parties are always being buttonholed when people find out their interesting specialties. Spare a thought, then, for memory expert Charan Ranganath, director of the memory and plasticity programme at the University of California, Davis. Because everyone is interested in - if not downright worried about - their memories.

"Nine times out of 10, people will say, 'Oh, you should study me. I have a really bad memory," says Ranganath. "But with the 10th out of 10 I get, 'Oh, I've got a great memory, or occasionally, 'I don't remember unless I can visualise something. Do you know anything about that?' There are interesting questions."

Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, comes at such questions differently from most of us. He's not concerned about remembering more. In fact, he has turned down requests to write selfhelp books on the subject. "There are lots of good books out there on the topic. I wanted to say: 'Well, what's optimal for memory in the first place?' And to get to that, you have to understand what memory is for."

Which you might have thought you knew already. But not quite. Ranganath's theory will be a comfort to the forgetful. "You'll never remember everything. So, if your expectation is that you're supposed to, that's probably off. People don't necessarily try to remember in the way that our brain was optimised to do, and so that makes it harder and unnecessarily frustrating."

In fact, we are designed to forget, he says. Forgetting isn't bad, as long as you can remember what you need to. And he wants his new book, Why We Remember: The Science of Memory and How It Shapes Us to change the way people think about what their memory should be doing for them. It's a book full of startling but practical conclusions about... um, oh, you know.