You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hume. Neuroscientist Lisa Genova says,

when we can't remember where it is we put our phones or why we walked into the living room,

there's nothing to worry about. Forgetting is necessary. She explains in her talk about the

science of memory, followed by a Q&A session

with TED's science curator, David Bielo, as he pulls questions from the live virtual audience.

This talk and conversation was recorded at a TED membership exclusive event in 2021.

Learn more and become a TED member at TED.com slash membership.

Thinking about the past week, did any of you forget where you put your phone?

Did you have a word stuck on the tip of your tongue?

You couldn't remember the name of an actor or that movie a friend recommended.

Did you forget to take out the trash or move the laundry

from the washer to the dryer or to pick up something from the grocery store you meant to buy?

What is going on here? Is your memory failing? It's not. It's doing exactly what it's supposed

to do. For all, it's miraculous, necessary,

and pervasive presence in our lives, memory is far from perfect. Our brains are not designed

to remember people's names, to do something later, or to catalog everything we encounter.

These imperfections are simply the factory settings.

Even in the smartest of heads, memory is fallible. A man famous for memorizing over 100,000

digits of pie can also forget his wife's birthday or why he walked into the living room. Most of us will forget

the majority of what we experience today by tomorrow. Added up, this means we actually don't remember

most of our own lives. Think about that. So what determines what we remember and what we forget? Here are two examples of super common

memory failures and why they're totally normal. Number one, where did I put my phone, my keys, my

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