Ted Audio Collective.

You're listening to Ted Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh.

Have you ever been trying to think of a name, or a common saying,

or even your four-digit pin for a bank card

and your brain just can't call it up?

I've been there.

Neuropsychologist Nicole Byers says it happens to all of us, and stress makes it worse.

In her 2023 talk from Ted X Sunni Upstate, she helps us address these little errors with a simple solution after the break.

I came home from vacation recently, jet-lagged, tired, after delayed flights and a lost bag, with my

cranky preschooler and my husband treading behind me, and I forgot the code to my

front door.

We've lived in this house for seven years.

I'd put the code in the door hundreds of times before.

And as I stood there staring at the keypad, I thought, oh boy, I'm finally losing my mind.

Our brains have an incredible capacity to store memory, but not all of that information is accessible at once.

An article in Scientific America estimates the human brain can store 2.5 million gigabytes of

data. That's gigabytes of data.

That's about 5,000 iPhones.

But if you've ever forgotten a password before,

you know that memory is not always easy to access. Because memory is not just one system.

Those different systems have limits.

And a number of factors in our daily lives

...