Your memory, like most things, will work better the more you use it. However, you don't have to go around trying to remember things, just exercise it and stretch it a little.

Good ways to do this are play games such as chess, bridge and Scrabble; read challenging books and broadsheet newspapers in depth, do crossword puzzles, sign up for a course where you learn a new subject.

There's evidence that physical exercise helps too. Researchers at Duke University Medical Centre in North Carolina found that walking, jogging and cycling can prevent memory and mental skills declining with age. It's believed that exercise increases the flow of oxygen-rich blood to the brain.

Thirty minutes of aerobic exercise three times a week brings noticeable improvements in memory. And walking seems to be the best bet. Another study compared walking to stretching and toning exercises in the elderly and found that walking brought the most positive effects in memory, planning and scheduling.

Diet has an impact

A diet high in fat can impair memory skills - in rats, anyway. In a study published in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, Canadian scientists found that rats which ate a lot less fat got consistently better scores in memory tests than their chubby chums.

You could also try adding fresh sage and rosemary leaves to your food. Sage, which is traditionally associated with longevity, is reputed to help restore a failing memory in older people. And rosemary is known for its powers to strengthen the memory: in fact, invigorating rosemary essential oil is often sniffed by office workers to give them a brain boost during the mid-afternoon slump.

Taking gingko biloba can also help. It has been shown that a single dose can improve your attention span by up to six hours. It does this by improving the blood flow to the brain.

Chew it over

Chewing gum can also improve memory according to British psychologists. They found that people who chewed throughout tests of both long-term and short-term memory produced significantly better scores than people who did not. But gum- chewing did not boost memory-linked reaction times, used as a measure of attention.

There are three main potential explanations:

• Japanese researchers showed that brain activity increases while people chew.
• Insulin receptors in the brain may be stimulated because through chewing, the body is expecting food.
• Chewing increases the heart rate, and that improves the supply of oxygen in the brain.

And if you suffer from those ‘senior moments’ scientists also believe that low-dose nicotine patches may improve the memory lapses that seem to happen more often with age. In tests on patients aged between 60 and 90, use of the patches cut the time it took them to make decisions in standard memory tests by half, and found it easier to concentrate on the tasks in hand.

But be warned, the findings do not outweigh the health risks of smoking itself. Smokers still need to give up.

Memory techniques

Tony Buzan, author of many 'mind' books including Use Your Head and Use Your Memory, invented 'mind maps' in the 1960s.

Beloved of management training courses worldwide, mind maps are graphic devices which aim to harness ‘word, image, number, logic, rhythm, colour and spatial awareness’ to enhance the brain's potential and improve learning.

The organisation runs a lot of courses in the UK for adults and for children. You can find out more at on their website: www.mind-map.com/EN

And of course there are many commercial websites that charge anything from a few pounds, to hundreds of pounds that offer memory management courses.