Assert yourself, particularly if you’re confused. Try repeating what you’re hearing.“Don’t let the doctor cut you off,” says M. Barton Laws, a medical sociologist at Brown University who researches provider-patient relationships. What researchers call “verbal dominance” is a known issue in the medical field, and Laws has established that the more of the talking the physician does, the fewer things a person remembers. When faced with someone in a white coat, don’t go mute. Assert yourself, particularly if you’re confused. Try repeating what you’re hearing (“Wait, I think I heard you say … ”).In a study of 189 outpatient encounters, Laws and his colleagues found that people recalled less than half of what their doctors told them a week earlier. There are many reasons a doctor’s words might slip your mind. “People who are under stress don’t remember,” Laws says. What is said after a traumatic diagnosis might disappear altogether. Laws says that patients are most likely to recall directives (“Get your blood drawn down the hall”) and least likely to recollect explainers (“This is how diabetes can damage your liver”). There can also be a kind of motivated forgetting when a doctor suggests behavior changes (“Eat less sugar”).Many appointments are allotted just 15 minutes, during which medical providers often home in on what they think is “the chief complaint.” In practice, though, patients bring up as many as 15 different issues during a visit. Show up with a list of the three main things you want to talk about, and go over all three before your doctor starts talking. “Avoid doorknob questions,” Laws says — what doctors call inquiries they get when the appointment is already over. You can always ask to see your medical records and doctor’s notes; you’re legally entitled to them.Some 20 years ago, Laws was hired to investigate how people living with H.I.V. were taking, and sometimes skipping, their prescribed antiretroviral medications. Those accounts made him realize that what patients understand is just as vital to care as what doctors say. He believes the communication onus should be on medical providers. Still, as a patient, you have agency. “When people participate, they remember better,” Laws says.

Be prepared to do much of the work alone and to fall; you will.“You have to believe, ‘Today is the day I’m going to walk,’ ” says Brady Johnson, a former senior airman for the U.S. Air Force from Belvidere, Ill., who suffered a catastrophic stroke in 2004 during a surgery for a cerebral hemorrhage. One day, Johnson was a healthy 31-year-old training for a marathon. The next thing he knew, he was waking from a weeklong coma, unable to talk or walk. “Day 1 was terrible for me,” he says. “But Day 2, I said, ‘This is a war.’” Someone has a stroke every 40 seconds in the United States; strokes are a leading cause of serious, long-term disability. In rehab, you’ll most likely start with leg lifts in bed, progress to a walker supported by a therapist and work up to a cane. Johnson went on to walk without a cane despite never regaining feeling on his right side. He can’t run anymore, which frustrates him, so he has turned to competitive bodybuilding instead. Practice your balance. At the beginning, Johnson would stand holding a book to get his right hand and arm working together with his left. Strengthen your muscles. “Don’t just sit there,” says Johnson, who does leg exercises during every commercial when he watches television. Be prepared to do much of the work alone. Johnson’s medical insurance covered eight weeks of rehabilitation and physical therapy. He knows other stroke survivors who got half that, even when the relearning might require a lifetime of work and discipline. “It’s something I’ll always be learning,” Johnson says.Don’t look down at your feet. You need to extend your gaze out into the distance. “Keep your chin up and shoulders down,” Johnson says. Be prepared to fall; you will. When Johnson was practicing without his cane, he would choose a path along the edge of a grassy lawn for a softer landing. If you can, watch toddlers. Three years after his stroke, Johnson and his wife had a baby boy. Witnessing his son learn to walk offered the most profound lesson of all. Never wracked by doubt, the boy took to the task with playful resilience. “He’d fall, look at me, roll over, stand himself up and walk off,” Johnson says. “I’d see him and think, That’s what I need to do.”

With effort, it’s possible to forget certain memories. Start by identifying what triggers them.“We are what we remember of ourselves,” says Michael Anderson, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge who studies memory. How you will remember your life as an 80-year-old will depend on the ways you hold on to, or let go of, memories. Your brain is always in the process of forgetting, but Anderson believes you can forget with more intentionality — what he calls motivated forgetting — and that you can get better at it with practice. “You sculpt your memories,” he says.Memory relies on what cognitive scientists call retrieval cues. Say you’re trying not to think about a painful breakup, but then the same type of blue Prius your ex drove pulls up next to you at a red light. Memories flood in. If you’re trying to forget something, become attuned to that memory’s retrieval cues so you can reshape the way your brain responds to them. You can try to avoid such triggers, but that strategy rarely works. A Vietnam War veteran might take care to shun anything reminiscent of warfare and still get yanked back into combat imagery while trying to order dinner at a restaurant. “How could you anticipate that a bamboo place mat would remind you of war?” Anderson says. Rather than total retrieval-cue avoidance, try a technique called thought substitution. If you had a bitter argument with your sister and think of it every time you see her, work to focus on other, more positive associations. Practice until your brain sees her face and surfaces those better memories first and not the fight. You can also work on what cognitive scientists call direct suppression. “You just kind of put up the mental hand and say, ‘Nope, I don’t want to think about that,’” Anderson says. While these two mechanisms for forgetting often work together, they’re neurologically distinct. Thought substitution relies on the left prefrontal cortex; direct suppression on the right.Your ability to forget is determined, in part, by your specific neural architecture. Studies also show that extreme stress and lack of sleep will make you worse at motivated forgetting. People who have experienced more adversity in their lives are better at it than people who haven’t known such hardships. If you’ve lived through something traumatic, it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to wipe the experience from your brain entirely. What you can do is limit the extent to which those memories will intrude, unwanted.