RUNNING OUT OF STORAGE

IN AN ERA OF DATA OVERLOAD, FORGETFULNESS CAN FEEL INEVITABLE. BUT SCIENTISTS SAY THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A "BAD" MEMORY ONLY AN UNTRAINED ONE. HERE'S HOW TO TONE UP YOUR GREY MATTER.

- GINNY GRAVES

ALEXANDRA NICOLE TRELLE, a memory researcher at Stanford University, is explaining why dozens of research centres in the world are feverishly trying to understand the most effective ways of improving our powers of recall. "There are huge studies in parts of Europe as well, so the scope is really..." she says, leaving dead air where more words should be. "International?" I fill in. "It's an international effort," she says.

Trelle's inability to come up with the word "international" is a minor lapse-nothing like the time I blanked on my next-door neighbour's name when introducing her to a friend. But the fragility of memory is precisely why so many scientists are seeking effective ways to protect and even augment one of the brain's most vital functions.

There's some serious Black  Mirror stuff in the works. Neuroscientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Centre have completed a human trial of an implant that delivers targeted electrical pulses to the brain, enhancing recall by 37%. Researchers at both MIT and the French National Centre for Scientific Research have successfully put false memories into the brains of mice. Even more sci-fi, companies such as Synchron Inc and Elon Musk's Neuralink Corp are trying to build brain-computer interfaces that might one day allow our minds to merge with digital memory banks.

The scientific frenzy is driven in no small part by an everyday mystery that, odds are, worries you, too: why do so many of us who almost certainly don't have diagnosable memory problems forget the name of the film we watched last week, or wander into the living room only to stand there, awkwardly, unable to remember what we came for?

HIGH ALERTNESS

My search for answers led me to the Stanford Memory Lab, where Trelle, 32, who has been studying memory for a decade, agreed to show me around.