Journey of Memory

Journey through the captivating intricacies of memory.

Memory is a profound force that lies at the heart of our identities and daily decisions. Our memories impact everything from our career choices and relationships to our core beliefs and values. Memories influence how we perceive the world and make sense of our experiences. Remarkably, our happiness and satisfaction depend on our memories – not from what we’ve actually experienced, but from how we remember our experiences. 

In essence, our “remembering selves” are continuously molding our thoughts, emotions, and actions –⁠ often without our conscious awareness. 

We’ll unravel the hidden forces of memory that shape our identities, relationships, and social realities. You’ll gain insights into the fundamental mechanisms of memory, the reasons behind forgetting, and strategies for remembering what truly matters. 

Beyond that, you’ll explore the malleable nature of memory and how our personal memories intertwine with those of others to form the fabric of human experience.

The science of remembering –⁠ and forgetting

Have you ever wondered why some memories stick with us for decades while others seem to vanish without a trace? The answer lies in how the human brain’s memory systems evolved to prioritize essential information and adapt to changing environments.

Our brains are bombarded with more information daily than we could ever hope to store. In order to ease this cognitive overload, our brains essentially “vote” on what details to remember. More specifically, our brains create connections between cells, and these collections decide what to hold onto based on what sustains our attention amid the onslaught of stimuli. 

This voting process allows us to efficiently perceive and prioritize the most relevant details in our environments –⁠ such as distinguishing speech sounds while tuning out background noise. It also causes routine events to blur together over time. This is due to an intense competition that takes place between similar memories interfering with one another. 

So how do you purposely turn a piece of information into an enduring memory? The key is to guide your attention and intention toward encoding distinctive details during the experience itself. Doing this requires the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that acts as a sort of central executive. It coordinates activity across the brain and sorts more important memories from less important ones. 

The best way to help your prefrontal cortex order your brain to store a particular memory? Practice mindfulness. At pivotal moments, consciously pause and try to fully absorb the kaleidoscope of sensory details you’re experiencing. Focus on sight, sound, smell, texture, and emotion. This will allow for richer, more entrenched coding in your brain. 

Contrary to our modern impulses, what you probably don’t want to do is take a photo or a video of the moment. Studies show that, despite our best efforts to preserve a memory, the act of recording itself can sometimes distance us from the experience. This ultimately makes the memory less vivid. 

By understanding how our brain’s selective memory systems operate and applying mindful attention during experiences, we can enhance our ability to encode and retain our most meaningful moments.

Memory and time travel

The aroma of roasting chestnuts wafts up into your nostrils. Instantly, you feel yourself transported 20 years back to that magical trip to Paris, where the same smell had embraced you on your evening walks. 

Memories have an almost magical ability to transport us across years and vast distances. This incredible ability to mentally time travel is a core part of how human memory works. 

Our brains have two very different types of memory systems: The first is semantic memory, used for learning and recalling facts and knowledge. The second is episodic memory, used for recalling personal experiences and events from the past. This is the type of memory that enables us to mentally time travel.

Episodic memory critically relies on a region of the brain called the hippocampus. The hippocampus encodes memories with a kind of sensory timestamp, which includes smells, emotions, and other senses. When we flash back to the past, the hippocampus reactivates the same brain cell clusters from the original experience. This allows us to revisit both the facts and the feelings and sensations of the past. Sights, sounds, and smells can trigger this process, vividly resurfacing long-dormant memories. 

However, the magic of episodic memory doesn’t just lie in its ability to take us back in time. It also anchors us in the present and informs our future actions. 

Picture waking up disoriented in an unfamiliar hotel room. Thanks to the hippocampus, you’re able to quickly retrieve recent memories of checking in to the hotel to remind you of your current surroundings. Without it, you’d feel completely unmoored from your sense of place and time. 

Likewise, the hippocampus’s activities directly inform how we navigate future actions. Take trying to remember where you last left your wallet. The hippocampus can help you reconstruct the context surrounding that event by pulling up information from around the same time. By mentally reinstating those associated details, you're better able to retrace your steps to find the wallet.

Whether rooting us in the here-and-now or enabling us to summon lessons from days gone by, the ability to revisit our lived experiences helps shape who we are.

The secret to exceptional memory

Imagine being able to memorize the order of a newly-shuffled deck of cards in just ten minutes. Sounds like a superhuman feat, right? Actually, no. Scott Hagwood, a four-time-winner of the USA Memory Championship, can do it –⁠ but he wasn’t born with any exceptional abilities. He began training his memory at 36 years old, after receiving a cancer diagnosis. A year later, he could memorize names, poetry, card sequences, and random word-and-number sequences in just five to 15 minutes. 

How is this possible? Well, having an exceptional memory isn’t about storing tons of raw data in our brains. Instead, it’s about how we structure and access that data. To that end, the memory champions’ secret is chunking. It's a strategy where large bits of information are broken down into smaller, more manageable chunks –⁠ just like we do when we memorize a phone number by breaking it down into groups of digits for area code, network provider, and so on. This technique enables us to compress data so our brains can handle more at any given time.

Yet chunking alone can't explain how we form rich memories of complex events. This is where schemas come in. Schemas are mental frameworks that organize our experiences into reusable patterns, much like an architect’s blueprint. For instance, your brain doesn’t need to create a new memory every time you walk into an IKEA store. Instead, it can group the common features of all your past IKEA trips into one blueprint, which enables you to hone in on what’s meaningfully different this time compared to all previous times.

You can utilize the power of schemas along with chunking if you’re trying to memorize something like the order of a deck of cards. Don’t try to memorize each card in isolation. Instead, make up a story that relates them to one another. For instance, “The king used a jack to replace his flat tire and then drove seven miles to the Ace gas station.” 

In our data-saturated world, we can enhance our ability to encode and retrieve meaningful memories by mastering techniques like chunking, and by leveraging our schemas.

Surprise and curiosity

Imagine walking to the entrance of your home. On the sidewalk, you notice something lying on the ground –⁠ is that a jacket? When you step inside, your pulse quickens and your eyes dart around, noticing the furniture has been disturbed. A feeling of dread creeps in… you've been robbed! 

This unsettling scenario illustrates how our memories don’t just orient us to the past. They also attune us to anything irregular unfolding in the present moment. The eerie sense that alerted you to the break-in arises from what neuroscientists call the orienting response.

The orienting response is essentially the “What is it?” reflex. Our brains are highly sensitive to novelty and irregularities in our surroundings. When something defies our expectations based on past experiences, it triggers neurological shifts –⁠ like dilated pupils and increased blood flow to the brain –⁠ that help us figure out what’s different. 

This reflex does more than alert us to differences –⁠ it help encode these unexpected events into memory. But another feeling has this effect, too: curiosity. 

One Caltech study found that motivational centers of the brain were triggered when participants were asked trivia questions that piqued their curiosity. Participants were better at later remembering the answers to those questions. But, perhaps surprisingly, their memories were also enhanced for unrelated information they were exposed to during the curious mindstate. 

However, our curiosity about the unfamiliar can be a double-edged sword. Too much uncertainty can breed anxiety and fear in some individuals. The hippocampus codes for mismatches between our present experiences and our bank of past memories. But when there is too little overlap, the world can feel threatening and filled with potential dangers rather than appealing knowledge gaps to resolve. 

This means we face a choice in approaching novelty –⁠ will we turn inward and retreat from the unsettling feeling of the new and undiscovered? Or can we muster a sense of patient curiosity that helps us explore the frontiers of our understanding?

Remember that time you got lost in the mall?

Imagine being able to dig deep into your mind, and tweak and reshape the memories of your past. This concept is a staple of science fiction –⁠ but it’s not so far-fetched from how human memory really operates. When recalling a memory, we actively edit it, blending past and present into something subtly, or even significantly, different from the original event. 

In fact, under the influence of external suggestion or pressure, memories can be fabricated out of thin air. Take the “lost in the mall” experiment conceived by psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. Participants were presented with fabricated stories about their childhood, including one where the participant had gotten lost in a shopping mall. Over time, with subtle suggestions, a significant number of participants began to “remember” this event, filling in the blanks with details that aligned with the false narrative. Loftus showed definitively that false memories could be implanted by suggesting events that never occurred. 

This feature of memory has profound implications, especially in the context of legal proceedings, where the reliability of eyewitness testimony can be crucial. It also leads to cases where suspects may falsely confess to crimes they never committed, under the influence of suggestion or pressure. 

Importantly, however, memories aren't simply flimsy reconstructions subject to haphazard alteration. While memories can indeed be influenced and sometimes fabricated under certain conditions, it doesn’t render all memories unreliable or fictitious. Studies show that not everyone is equally susceptible to false memories. Additionally, the context in which memories are “recovered” or discussed plays a crucial role. In therapeutic settings, the dynamic between a patient and therapist can heavily influence the patient's recollections. That said, many trauma survivors have consistent, vivid, and accurate memories of their experiences and can convey them without any suggestive prompting. 

This nuanced understanding of memory is vital, especially in the discourse surrounding the #MeToo movement and other contexts where the accuracy of memory is contested. It's essential to approach memories, particularly those of traumatic events, with a nuanced perspective that acknowledges both the potential for distortion and the capacity for accuracy.

Learning and memory

At work, in school, and life in general, we’re taught to avoid mistakes at all costs. This is a real shame, since making mistakes is crucial for learning.

This is illustrated by the story of a college professor who was dreading having to teach his class via a virtual setup during the COVID-19 pandemic. Watching his own daughter struggle to stay engaged in her online courses, he worried about how his students would respond to remote learning. But then his own research on memory provided him with a stroke of inspiration. He decided that when it came to measuring learning achievement, he would do away with tests. Instead, he switched to weekly open-book quizzes, whereby students could review their answers afterward. His method was a success; 85 percent of his students said the quizzes greatly helped them learn.

What’s the reason for this? The college professor’s method tapped into the brain’s mechanism of error-driven learning. This is a feature of our brains that tells us we learn best when we need to pull up knowledge from memory. When taking the weekly quizzes, the students’ brains were actively retrieving information instead of passively absorbing the material. 

The science behind this phenomenon builds upon insights about the neural basis of memory. Memories are constructed from networks of firing neurons called cell assemblies. During the quiz, students aimed to reawaken the relevant cell assembly for each question. If successful, they reinforced that cluster. But if they failed to accurately retrieve the necessary information, their brains pinpointed gaps and weaknesses that needed to be repaired in the cell assembly. Through this error-driven process, students’ brains purposefully updated memories to make them more robust and accurate.

The principles of error-driven learning highlight the importance of embracing struggles and mistakes as stepping stones toward mastery. By reconceptualizing failure as a fundamental aspect of learning, we can cultivate environments that encourage experimentation and growth, both in classrooms and in life.

Social influences on memory

We often think of our memories as belonging solely to us. But the truth is that they’re profoundly shaped by our social world. Memory is inherently collective, tied to our relationships and interactions with others.

From an early age, the way our families discuss shared experiences molds the stories we tell about our own lives. For instance, studies show that teenagers from families who reminisce about shared experiences together are less likely to have mental health issues like depression and anxiety. This suggests that families have an influence on the way that children’s autobiographical memories develop.

The social dimension of memory is quite complex. Group interactions, for example, can lead to collaborative inhibition. This phenomenon describes how collective memory can be poorer than individual memory. One reason for this is that dominant voices within a group can overshadow quieter group members and cause them to forget details they may have otherwise remembered. Let’s say you’re discussing a movie you watched with friends, and one person keeps going on about how much she hated the performance of one of the actors. This might cause you to forget how other actors in the film performed, and only recall scenes including the badly-performing actor. 

Conversely, collaborative facilitation occurs when group members value each other’s unique inputs. As a result, they can surpass the memory performance of solo individuals. Additionally, long-term partners can develop compensatory strategies that maximize their combined recall strengths. Some research even shows that people with memory disorders like amnesia can solve challenging problem-solving tasks after interacting with their spouse.

Another layer of complexity lies in the way that memories can be distorted as they’re shared and spread through social networks. Memory errors can easily propagate, accumulate, and ultimately take the place of the truth. Additionally, because people tend to remember negative over positive information, the significance of an event can be incorrectly weighted. For instance, the memory of a politician’s corrupt behavior is more likely to persist than the memory of a politician writing a bill to reduce corruption. 

This underscores the challenges involved in maintaining collective narrative integrity. However, by embracing diverse perspectives and actively engaging with a wide array of experiences, we can counteract the homogenizing forces of group recall and foster richer shared narratives.

Our memories profoundly shape our identities, relationships, and perception of reality – often without our conscious awareness. Factors such as attention, emotion, and context play key roles in memory formation. These mechanisms reveal why we retain vivid memories of some experiences and lose memories of others. Ultimately, embracing the social nature of memory and using strategies like retrieval practice can optimize our learning and help create a richer tapestry of shared human experiences.