Smartphones are amazing things. You can order a meal at a restaurant before you arrive or arrange for one to be delivered to your door; shop for groceries, talk face to face with family and friends, listen to music, read a book, move money through your banking app, send emails and texts, and more. An estimated 67 percent of people over the age of 75 use a Smartphone, and now a new, memory strengthening app designed by a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Toronto may see a surge in sales.

Professor Morgan Barense is an award winning cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, who knows that remembering what happened to us in the past is more than just looking back to the past. The memories our brains store and recall affect who we are, how we behave, and how we connect with others. It’s why reminiscence therapy is part of good dementia care. ‘When you start to lose your memory for the past, that can be really disorienting because you feel disconnected, not only from the things that you've done, but who you are as a person,’ she said.

The hippocampus is the brain region that supports memory recall. A reduction in hippocampal volume and function is linked to age -related memory decline. The Professor and her team developed an application (app), that mimics the way the hippocampus works for a smart phone to help older adults preserve memories in rich detail. ‘We took fundamental principles from cognitive psychology and a bit of what we know about how the hippocampus supports memory… And put them into an easy-to-use application,’ said Professor Barense (Click here for more).

Her team then recruited older adults age 61 to 76 and asked them to use the smart phone app for either two or 10 weeks. Participants recorded short videos of events. The app automatically assigned some of these memories to be replayed at scheduled intervals (like the hippocampus) while others were not. The scientists then tested participants’ memories by asking them to describe everything they recalled about each event: and after replaying the self-generated memory clips participants remembered 50 percent more detail. Their moods were also more positive as they recalled the memories more fully.

Researchers also measured participants’ hippocampus brain activities as they watched their memory clips and completed a memory test. fMRI scans showed that replaying memory cues with HippoCamera altered the pattern of activity within the hippocampus, making the everyday life experiences more distinctive and memorable.

To date, suggestions for strengthening memory have been a bit like the HippoCamera but without the camera. They’ve include taking a mental snapshot of what you want to remember and at the same time telling yourself what you are doing. An example is when putting your house key on a hook you would pause to take a mental snapshot and say to yourself, ‘I am putting my house key on the hook that’s on the board on the wall near the back of the door.’ HippoCamera seems to go a step further and allows you to playback video of that memory. The difference is that unless you repeat your verbal cue about the door key the memory will eventually fade, but HippoCamera can preserve memory for the events of your life.

HippoCamera could be the answer to a peculiar phenomenon in my family that affects a few of us in each generation: we forget where we put things. Especially if they have been put in a safe place. I’ll request a Beta version of the app and will tell you how it works.

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