  Cooperative events requiring anomalously large fluctuations are a defining
characteristic for the onset of glassy relaxation across many materials. The
importance of such intermittent events has been noted in systems as diverse as
superconductors, metallic glasses, gels, colloids, and granular piles. Here, we
show that prohibiting the attainment of new record-high energy fluctuations --
by explicitly imposing a ``lid'' on the fluctuation spectrum -- impedes further
relaxation in the glassy phase. This lid allows us to directly measure the
impact of record events on the evolving system in extensive simulations of
aging in such vastly distinct glass formers as spin glasses and tapped granular
piles. Interpreting our results in terms of a dynamics of records succeeds in
explaining the ubiquity of both, the logarithmic decay of the energy and the
memory effects encoded in the scaling of two-time correlation functions of
aging systems.
