Forgetting a hotel room number, a dinner reservation or where you parked the rental car is not necessarily a sign your brain is failing. According to Andrew Budson, a professor of neurology at Boston University, some forgetfulness is simply the brain doing its job: with a lifetime of memories already stored, it automatically prioritises what seems important and lets the rest go. Younger minds soak up everything; older ones filter. Either way, there are practical, research-backed ways to help the useful stuff stick — and they happen to be handy when you are travelling.
The first trick is to invent a silly mental image. Linking something absurd to what you want to remember makes it far more memorable. Worried you left the stove on? Picture a winged pink pig swooping down to switch it off. The same logic works for future tasks, which are genuinely harder for the brain than recalling the past — memory evolved to use past experience to plan ahead, Budson says. His own example: to remember a dentist appointment after lunch, he imagines eating sticky toffee dessert that coats his teeth. When real lunch rolls around, the image resurfaces and so does the appointment.
Second, say things out loud. Research on the 'production effect' shows that speaking an action or word aloud and hearing yourself say it improves recognition memory. A 2023 meta-analysis found reading words aloud helped people recognise information when they saw it again. Budson compares it to upgrading a visual snapshot into a little movie with sound. So narrate that you have locked the hotel door or put the passports in the day bag.
Third, chunk items together. Short-term memory can juggle only a handful of things at once, so collapsing small items into bigger groups helps — the reason phone and account numbers are broken up with hyphens. Applied to travel, you might organise a packing or shopping list by category or by shop section rather than item by item.
Fourth, use the memory palace method: assign each item on a list to a spot in a familiar room or route, ideally with a vivid or funny image attached — ketchup leaking across the living room rug, mustard smeared on the bathroom mirror. Budson bets that 24 hours later you can mentally walk through the house and recall every item you placed.
One caveat: normal forgetfulness is not the same as a warning sign. Forgetting the details of a conversation from an hour ago, or a name you were just told, is typical. Forgetting that the conversation happened at all, or that you met the person, is when experts suggest talking to a healthcare provider — especially if family or friends start noticing the lapses.
For travellers, these tricks are cheap, portable and genuinely useful in unfamiliar environments, where the usual routines and cues that anchor memory are missing. And as Ranganath puts it, memory is like packing for a trip: the brain takes only the experiences it thinks it will need. A few silly mental images can make sure the important ones make the suitcase.
