Ways to Improve Your Memory and Cognitive Function at Any Age

Older woman with glasses looking concerned at laptop — Photo: fizkes / Shutterstock

Your memory may hinge less on brain games than on how often you move your feet.

Story Snapshot

Walking boosts the brain’s memory center, the hippocampus, even in later life.
Short, regular walks can sharpen working memory, focus, and recall in minutes.
Moving while you learn or remember often beats sitting still at a desk.
Simple walking, done right and done often, becomes a quiet daily hedge against cognitive decline.

How Castel And Huberman Connect Walking To Memory

Dr. Alan Castel and Dr. Andrew Huberman explain that memory is a mental reconstruction of the past, not a perfect recording, and that simple physical movement changes how well that reconstruction works. They point to research showing that walking three to four times a week enhances the hippocampus, the brain region that handles declarative memories like names, events, and facts. For middle-aged and older adults, this is huge because that same region tends to shrink as we age, dragging memory down with it.

Castel and Huberman describe memory as “error-prone but improvable,” and walking as a practical way to nudge it in the right direction. Their broader conversation covers retrieval practice, sleep, and curiosity, but walking stands out because it is low-tech, cheap, and accessible to almost anyone who can move. Walking adds blood flow, oxygen, and helpful chemicals to the brain, which together help memories stick and stay usable longer. They frame walking not as exercise for vanity, but as routine maintenance for your mental hard drive.

What The Hard Science Says About Walking And The Brain

A landmark yearlong trial found that older adults who walked about 40 minutes a few times a week grew their hippocampus by roughly two percent, while non-walkers saw it shrink by more than one percent. That small growth translated into better scores on memory tests and suggested that the brain was wiring new connections, not just holding the line. This supports the idea that moderate walking does not simply slow decline; it can gently reverse some of it in the parts of the brain that matter most for everyday memory.

Other studies show effects on much shorter time scales. Ten minutes of walking improved performance on memory and feature detection tasks across age groups. Walking while encoding new vocabulary led to better later recall than staying still on a chair. Walking outside for fifteen minutes boosted attention and working memory more than the same walk indoors. Researchers also found that brisk walking and other moderate-to-vigorous activity, even as little as five minutes a day, predicted better processing speed, executive function, and working memory in older adults.

How Moving While You Think Changes The Way You Remember

Memory is not a separate “thinking box” locked away from the rest of the body; it is tightly linked to motor systems. Experiments show that children and adults often perform better on demanding working memory tasks while walking at their own pace than while sitting still. Very light treadmill walking during learning helped subjects recall vocabulary later compared with being sedentary. Taken together, these findings suggest that light movement keeps the brain in a more alert, flexible state, which helps it encode details and link them together.

The large review literature backs this up. A National Institutes of Health–indexed analysis found that both short-term and long-term memory can be enhanced after a single bout of exercise. Another review reported that acute exercise before or after encoding information can improve long-term recall. The mechanism likely involves a mix of increased blood flow, release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and changes in chemicals like adrenaline that mark memories as important. Walking is one of the simplest ways to trigger these processes without special equipment.

Walking, Aging, And The Reliability Pendulum

Cognitive science has spent decades swinging between “memory is unreliable” and “memory is basically reliable with limits.” A major review from University College London argued that the field recently overemphasized malleability and is now returning to a more balanced view: memory is essentially reliable most of the time but open to distortion. That matters because older adults are often told their memories are doomed to fail, when in fact many everyday memories remain robust if the brain stays active.

8 ways to improve your memory at any age, from one of the world's leading experts on cognitive aging, Dr. Alan Castel:

1) Let yourself make mistakes. pic.twitter.com/6Ezh26hgJz

— Huberman Lab Clips (@HLPClips) July 15, 2026

Walking fits neatly into this more grounded story. It does not magically turn flawed recall into courtroom-level proof, but it helps the systems behind memory work more cleanly: better blood flow, healthier brain tissue, sharper attention, and more consistent mood. You cannot outsource your memory to an app. You can, however, lace up your shoes and give your brain the physical support it needs to keep telling your life story clearly.