Maybe a very good memory can be developed through mental exercise

[JBG]

See these two articles, Eleanor Maguire, Memory Expert Who Studied London Cabbies, Dies at 54 (unpaywalled link) and Keep Getting Lost? Maybe You Grew Up on the Grid.(unpaywalled link). Let me preface this with two things: 1) I did not know where to post this; and 2) I have an extremely good memory for everything but connecting names with faces.

Excerpt from Eleanor Maquire article, which was in yesterday's paper:

Eleanor Maguire, a cognitive neuroscientist whose research on the human hippocampus — especially those belonging to London taxi drivers — transformed the understanding of memory, revealing that a key structure in the brain can be strengthened like a muscle, died on Jan. 4 in London.
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Working for 30 years in a small, tight-knit lab, Dr. Maguire obsessed over the hippocampus — a seahorse-shaped engine of memory deep in the brain — like a meticulous, relentless detective trying to solve a cold case.
An early pioneer of using functional magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.) on living subjects, Dr. Maguire was able to look inside human brains as they processed information. Her studies revealed that the hippocampus can grow, and that memory is not a replay of the past but rather an active reconstructive process that shapes how people imagine the future.

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The results, published in 1997, showed that blood flow in the right hippocampus increased sharply as the drivers described their routes — meaning that specific area of the brain played a key role in spatial navigation.

The article hit a "sweet spot" for me. I am almost 68 and my memory, always pretty good, has become better as I have aged and I always wondered why. This has startled many that I know, such as my wife early in our marriage, my long-time law colleague and a close friend I have had since late 1972.

I will save the story about my wife's finding this out for the second article description.

My senior law colleague alternates between being very impressed by my recollection of work going back to 1986 and calling it "ancient history." The former prevails when I can instantly retrieve paperwork I wrote in 1995 (the earliest our computer system goes back in retrievable form) and can share it with other people in our office.

One my long-time friends is a quintessential control freak. Also has an IQ off the charts. One funnier story with that was when we got our wives together for a brunch on February 28, 2010, the first joint outing since shortly after my wife and I married, in November 1991. He was pontificating on some political subject, and took a position almost verbatim from a recent Commentary Magazine article. I let him finish and said "Jim, you really read the January 2010 Commentary issue quite well." He then said "Jim, I didn't know you had become a conservative." I asked him what he meant and he said "well, you read Commentary, you don't believe in global warming." I rejoined with a verbatim quote from his deceased father from about 24 years earlier: " I don't feel safe forming an opinion until I've read Commentary and the Wall Street Journal." He laughed uproariously at the rare event of being upstaged and said "I must have a fantastic memory." Had this always been the case he would have remembered.
Now for the second article Keep Getting Lost? Maybe You Grew Up on the Grid.(unpaywalled link).

Players of varying nationalities performed differently. Urbanites from some places, like Spain, came very close to matching the navigation skills of their rural counterparts. In other nations, like the United States, people raised in cities were at a huge disadvantage.
One explanation, the researchers suggested, was that in countries whose biggest cities were complex patchworks, like Spain, chaotic street layouts had sharpened navigation skills. By contrast, nations known for more predictable urban designs, like the United States, put people from outside cities at a bigger advantage.

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The study speculated that more complex environments might help new neurons form in the hippocampus, a brain structure important in memory. The authors, though, emphasized that people still were able to develop navigation skills later in life.

This brought to mind a trip I took with my wife two months we married, in July 1991. We were in the Berkshires for the July 4 weekend. One of the days it rained (a rarity for that summer, which was basically one long heat wave from May to September), and we took a side trip to visit our old sleepaway camps, in my case Camp Greylock. I was driving up Route 8 at highway speeds, about 50 mph and hooked a hard left into my camp driveway. She asked when I had last been there and said "in 1972, as a visiting baseball player (from another camp). She said she hadn't realized how good my memory was. I see nothing wrong with keeping friends and colleagues somewhat on their guard; I have a long nose for male cattle manure.

What's the point of all of this: I believe a memory can be developed through intense use. Other views?