Question: Why are some people better at remembering things than others?

Ed Bracey answered on 9 Nov 2017:

Each brain is different, because everyone has slightly different genes that determine how their brains are made.
The brain is made using thousands of genes, so there’s a lot of variability in how different parts of the brain function.
They also have different life experiences which can also alter how our brains work.
We know that our brains create memories using a part of the brain called the hippocampus
It’s latin for seahorse, because if you cut it out of the brain, it looks like a seahorse: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52ec8c1ae4b047ccc14d6f29/t/53835846e4b08ed23a64d3aa/1490693661459/hippocampus_seahorse.jpg?format=300w
We know the hippocampus is important for memory formation because of a man called Henry Molaison.
He had very severe epilepsy – that’s when some brain cells are too active, causing people to have seizures.
Doctors tried all they could to stop his seizures, but no drugs were working.
So they got the surgeons in.
The surgeons found the parts of his brain that were causing the seizures and they cut them out. There was no other option at the time, and Henry was having several seizures a day, his life was no fun at all.
The surgeons removed Henry’s hippocampi – one on each side of the brain.
After he woke up from the operation, he couldn’t make any new memories.
He thought he was 23 years old right until he died at the age of 82!
Anything you told him, he’d forget a few seconds later!
The hippocampus is one of the areas of the brain that starts to shrink in Alzheimer’s disease, and this is likely why people with Alzheimer’s have such problems remembering things.
Drinking lots of alcohol can damage the hippocampus too (and the rest of the brain TBH).
So people with different abilities to remember things probably have differences in their hippocampi!