Lisa Genova

As a culture, we revere intellect and memory, and we tend to vilify forgetting. We cast Forgetting as the bad guy in the epic battle against everyone’s favorite hero, Remembering. But our memory system isn’t a war between good and evil. Most of what we forget every day is actually 100% normal. Our brains aren’t designed to remember people’s names, to do something later, or to catalog everything we encounter. These imperfections are simply the factory settings. But we tend to lay a lot of fear, shame, and stress on ourselves every time we forget to take out the trash, where we put our phones, or the name of a movie a friend recommended, and we’re unfairly punishing ourselves here.

Where did I put my phone, my keys, my glasses, park my car?

Oh, what’s his name?

Why did I come in this room?

How could I forget about my 4:00pm Zoom meeting?

These are all super common and TOTALLY NORMAL kinds of forgetting. Dr. Lisa Genova aims to humanize forgetting, to help people understand why these memory failures happen so they can relax, stop shaming themselves, and have a better relationship with their memory. In this talk focused on her newest book and New York Times bestseller, REMEMBER: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting – Genova explores the intricacies of how we remember, why we forget, and what we can do to protect our memories. Sharing strategies and tips for improving and protecting memory, she helps organizations and their employees become more efficient and productive as they gain insight into how memory works. She discusses all aspects of the mind – highlighting the correlation between stress, productivity, and performance as we aim to navigate a post-COVID world and succeed in new hybrid work environments. In this presentation she helps to answer the question: How can we improve the productivity and performance of our minds and our people?

When almost everything in Lisa Genova’s life seemed to be falling apart, a few other things began shifting into place. She was a neuroscientist who wanted to write a novel (eventually), but there seemed no other time than now to start. And yet, she felt stuck and uncertain of the future. So she asked herself three questions: If I could do anything I wanted, what would I do? If I didn’t have to care about what anyone thought of me, what would I do? and if I didn’t have to worry about money, what would I do? Each question eventually led to the same answer — write the novel. Inspired to craft a story from a humanizing perspective of people living with neurological diseases and disorders, like her grandmother, she began writing a story about a woman with Alzheimer’s. After many months of selling her self-published book out of the trunk of her car, Genova sold her book to Simon & Schuster, and Still Alice continues to make waves and invite global conversation to this day. She asks: “What if you could let go of all limitations and allow yourself to do anything you want to do — what would you do?”

In this talk, Dr. Lisa Genova shares insight into how to use storytelling as a vehicle for education, compassion, and conversation that can fuel powerful change. Using Alzheimer’s and her novel Still Alice as an example, Genova elucidates that when we learn through story, we have the opportunity to move from sympathy and distance to empathy and connection. When we shift from intellectually knowing something about a subject to knowing and feeling something about that subject, we’ve made a leap that is transformational. Story demystifies, humanizes, and is highly memorable.