Why We Forget and How to Remember Better, page 10
◦ Put your phone on do-not-disturb and out of sight. Just having your phone nearby can serve as a distractor. Even if you never look at it, having the goal of monitoring it for incoming messages and texts may compete with your goal of attending to the content you hope to remember.
• Align your in-the-moment goals with your memory goals. What you remember from an event is going to be tied to how you processed the event as it unfolded.
◦ If you’re interviewing for a job, you may be more focused on making a good impression than on remembering the details of your conversations. But if you plan to write thank-you notes to those with whom you met, you’ll want to keep that secondary goal in mind so that you have some specific content to refer to in each note.
◦ If you take the time to savor the happy moments from your relative’s fifth birthday party, you will give yourself the best chance of remembering that joy for years to come. Try to appreciate the time spent with him even if you’re carrying out mundane duties with him, like setting the table. You may, in fact, get more enjoyment out of those moments as they occur—and you’ll likely reap benefits again later when your memory is filled with moments of time spent together.
• If your goal of remembering is creating anxiety, reframe your goal. Anxiety can be a source of distraction; it can cause you to ruminate on past memory failures and other unpleasant thoughts rather than being attuned to the information present right now.
◦ For example, when someone introduces themselves, your mind may wander to the last time you failed to learn someone’s name—rather than listening carefully to them saying their name now!
◦ If you realize that your anxiety about learning information is getting in your way, a good strategy can be to think of an alternate goal that still facilitates paying close attention. For instance, challenge yourself to make a connection with every name you are told: She shares my aunt’s middle name. He has the same initials as my favorite author. Not only will you have to pay close attention to each name, but the connections will help you in remembering them. (More on remembering names in Chapter 24.) Most importantly, now it’s not a “memory task,” but a fun game. See how creative you can be in changing and reframing whatever memory task is stressing you out.
8
Get it into your memory—and keep it there
You worked into the wee hours of the morning on the report for the committee. You rehearsed what you would say as you created each page of the presentation booklet, committing facts and figures to memory. When your head finally hit the pillow, you were feeling good about the presentation, even if you wouldn’t get much sleep. A few hours later, you are in the conference room. Your first moments of the presentation go smoothly. Then, you ask everyone to flip to page 3 and, as you stare at the charts, you cannot remember why you chose to display this information. Why did you decide to show these figures? What were you intending to say?
Have you experienced a moment like this one, when you spent time preparing—feeling confident that you memorized the information—yet, when the critical moment arrives, you can’t remember what you were going to say? In this chapter we’ll examine some of the reasons why the process of keeping information in your memory can go awry.
The Memory Cycle
To understand these types of errors, we first need to understand how you convert the sights, sounds, smells, thoughts, and feelings that you are currently experiencing into a memory that you will be able to recall in the future.
Long-term episodic memory consists of three phases. First, to have a memory, your brain must take information that exists right now—the name you are being told or your thoughts about how you will narrate your presentation—and convert that information to a format that can be stored in your brain. As we mentioned in Chapter 4, this is encoding—turning an event into a “neural code.” Imagine encoding as building a structure out of blocks that models the current moment of time. That sounds good, but without further action to stick the blocks together, this structure will fall apart and the neural code will be lost. The long in long-term memory requires that your brain actively works to hold on to that content. Thus, the second phase of memory is storage. The third stage of memory is retrieval, when you reconstruct the structure out of its building blocks, thereby allowing you to re-access parts of a prior moment in time (more on this in Chapter 9).
While you might think about retrieval as the end point of a memory, retrieval is also a starting point. When you retrieve a memory, you are actually bringing a past moment into the present. Although the event happened in the past, your reflections on that event are happening right now and, as a result, these reflections can automatically restart the memory cycle. In other words, every retrieval is also an opportunity to re-encode that memory anew. Thus, as you retrieve a memory and, by so doing, rebuild the memory structure out of blocks, the “design” decisions you make—which portions of the structure you embellish, which you diminish, and which you leave out entirely—can affect how information is re-encoded into memory (see Figure 8.1). As we will see in Chapter 12, this cyclical re-encoding process can subtly alter or even radically change a memory—and can do so permanently.
Figure 8.1. The memory cycle in action. During the encoding of an event, different elements of that experience are assembled into a coherent memory structure, with the hippocampus acting as the binding tape. Those elements are then stored, with the hippocampus holding on to the blueprints for how to reassemble them. At retrieval, the blueprints are used to reconstruct the memory structure, with the hippocampus again serving as the tape that binds the elements together.
Failures in the Cycle
Memory failures can result from a disruption in any of these phases of the memory cycle. You could have failed to build and represent your experience in a way that can be stored—an encoding failure. Or you could have built the experience, but without the structural integrity needed to hold on to the information over time—a storage failure. Or you could have stored the knowledge yet have difficulty reconstructing it at the moment it is needed—a retrieval failure. We’ll focus on encoding and storage failures now, and on retrieval failures in Chapter 9.
Encoding Failures
Encoding failures abound. You may read the same sentences of your textbook over and over, yet still be unable to look away and recite back the details. You may be asked to describe someone you just saw and realize you have no idea about some of their key features: Were they wearing glasses? How long was their hair?
Think back to the examples from the prior chapter: how you could not remember whether you closed the garage door, or how little any of us remember about a penny’s details. These represent encoding failures—or at least encoding choices. It turns out that your brain is quite efficient at pulling in the gist—the general content or theme of information.1 You can quickly encode that you’re looking at a person who is a woman, taller than you, with dark hair. But it’s a more demanding process for your brain to pull in all the details, to build the representation of the person to include specifics such as the shape of her glasses or the length of her hair. Without substantial effort, those details won’t be included in the memory.
Focus Attention, Organize, Understand, Relate
To avoid encoding failures and minimize forgetting, try FOUR things:
Focus attention
Organize
Understand
Relate.
First, Focus: Pay attention to the information you are trying to remember, which will devote your brain’s resources to its processing. As discussed in Chapter 7, avoid distractions so that you can focus your attention on the to-be-remembered content.
Second, Organize: Organizing information is one good way to decrease the demands placed on the brain during encoding. Sometimes, these differences can be largely irrelevant, but other times, they can radically color how individuals remember and interpret an event. Imagine trying to memorize a phone number by its 10 separate digits: 5-0-5-2-1-4-1-0-3-1; that’s 10 things to remember—too much for most people. As we mentioned in Chapter 3, you can make it easier on yourself by chunking it into the more familiar 505-214-1031. This is a bit easier, but it will also take a lot of rehearsal, and you might still make some mistakes, such as reversing the order of some numbers. Next, imagine the sets of digits as dates (May 5th, February 14th, October 31st). Now you have only three chunks of information to remember, the three dates. It’s as if, instead of trying to construct a memory out of 10 separate blocks, one for each digit, you can now construct the same memory from just three blocks because you’ve stuck a bunch of the little blocks together—making the whole structure much easier to encode. It might take some time and creativity to find the patterns in a phone number that would be helpful for memorizing it, but even those efforts will make it more likely that you can encode the number into your memory without errors.
Third, Understand: Make sense of what you are trying to remember. Understanding information is different than simply spending time rehearsing it. No matter how many times you read about the Krebs cycle in your biology textbook, you are unlikely to encode the cycle into memory unless you’re trying to understand what you are reading.
Fourth, Relate: Connect the information to what you already know, or to things important to you. We acquire new knowledge by linking it to what we already understand. Without the foundational knowledge in place, new learning is more difficult. Imagine trying to learn long division without having already mastered addition and subtraction. The knowledge you start with provides a scaffolding that can allow you to learn new information with less effort. For example, once you have memorized the major bones in the body, it is much easier to learn the muscles that move them, and then the arteries that nourish the muscles.
Sometimes, the links between your existing concepts or events and the new information you are trying to remember may occur to you quickly and easily. In the phone-number example, you might have noticed that May 5th is Cinco de Mayo, February 14th is Valentine’s Day, and October 31st is Halloween. Those connections to your existing knowledge will make this information even easier to encode into memory—like using building blocks that you’ve already stuck together. Sometimes you may need to work harder to find the links, but the more effort you put into finding those connections, the more likely you will successfully encode the content into memory.
Part of the power of relating new information to our prior knowledge is that it can help us to organize the new information and give it meaning. Chess experts can look at a board and quickly retain a memory for where the pieces are, in part because each placement has meaning (the queen is being threatened, checkmate in three moves) and in part because they can chunk the board into smaller units so they don’t need to memorize each piece separately.2 When a novice looks at the board, they only see the separate pieces; they don’t have the knowledge to recognize meaningful patterns and chunk the pieces together. (Consistent with this idea, when chess experts are shown a board with the pieces distributed randomly, without placements that could have occurred through playing, they don’t show the same benefits in remembering the pieces on the board.)
Encoded, but Forgotten
Sometimes, it’s clear that you encoded a memory. But mere hours later, it’s as if the memory has vanished. As you finish studying and close your textbook, you can confidently summarize the Krebs cycle. A few hours later, to your horror, you cannot recognize any of the details on the multiple-choice test. This type of memory error, like the one we began the chapter with, suggests a storage failure. The memory was encoded and briefly existed, yet the content was not maintained.
At the turn of the 20th century, the fact that we forget was one of the first principles of memory to be discovered and systematically studied by the German scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus. Recently-learned information follows a predictable “forgetting curve,” with much information lost soon after learning.3 Indeed, extensive forgetting is the norm. Think about everything you did so far today that you can recall easily—what you ate for breakfast, which mug you drank your coffee from, where you found this book, and when you picked it up and continued reading. How many of those details will you remember tomorrow? A week from tomorrow? Next month? Most likely, you will recall very few of these details after a few days. Clearly the details were encoded—you can remember them now, even though those moments are in the past—but it’s unlikely that you will store them in a durable manner. Memories are usually transient,4 and only a select few will transition from being available moments after an event has occurred to being available days, weeks, or months later.
Over time, the content we store within a memory will also shift. In the minutes and hours after an event, you are likely to retain a reasonable number of details. Soon after a phone call with your cousin, you will likely remember the tone of their voice, the range of topics discussed, and many specific phrases the two of you used. A few days later, however, while you are likely to recall that the phone call happened, you are unlikely to remember most of these details. As time passes, our memories shift from storing the specifics of what happened to storing the gist of the event—its general outline or its meaning to us. This is one reason why our memories can, quite literally, become less vivid over time.5
Making Storage Happen
After an event has occurred, additional changes arise in the brain to ensure that the neural code of the event remains. Storage isn’t just something that happens automatically; there are active processes that keep us from forgetting important information. Some of these changes happen soon after we experience an event, resulting in lasting changes in the strength of connections between brain cells. Others unfold over longer periods of time, resulting in widespread changes across a vast network of brain regions.
Some of these active storage processes occur optimally while we are sleeping. That’s right—your brain isn’t “resting” while you sleep; your brain is actually highly active (a point we’ll return to in Chapter 20). The sleeping brain is also active in fundamentally different ways than it can be when you’re awake and actively processing the world around you. When distanced from the input of the surrounding world, your brain can go through the important work of sorting through the information encountered during the waking day and keeping the important memories so they are accessible in the future. Sometimes, as in the example at the outset of the chapter, too little sleep can contribute to storage failures by preventing the brain from having the neurobiological environment needed to stabilize the neural code of an event into a long-lasting memory.
Prioritizing the Right Content
How does your brain know which memories to keep? In other words, what makes a memory important to remember? Many of the clues the brain uses to figure out what is important are present as an event is initially being experienced. And the good news is that there are many ways you can help guide your brain to prioritize which memories to keep!
Emotional Content
Your brain relies on your body’s responses to experienced events as one of the clues to figuring out whether something is important to you. Did your heart skip a beat when your child called you to announce their engagement? Did you feel your palms sweating as you walked to the front of the room to begin a presentation? The bodily systems that cause you to have these reactions to emotional or stressful events can simultaneously tag the ongoing event as one that is of importance.6 Emotion and stress are designed to help us focus on the parts of our environment that demand our attention right now, weeding out other distractions. Later, our brain tends to prioritize the storage of those tagged events.
Even if the information may not be intrinsically emotional, you can often give information emotion by thinking deeply about what your own, personal, emotional reaction to the information would be if it were happening to you. If you’re reading about the details of a historical battle or a political campaign, think about the emotions you would feel if you were in the thick of it when the flak was flying fiercely.
Distinctive Content
Content that is surprising or distinctive—standing out from other information in some way—can also be prioritized for storage, even if it doesn’t elicit a bodily response.7 Sometimes, that distinctiveness can be thought of as a property of the content. Swear words are conceptually distinctive because of their meaning and their relative taboo (at least in polite society). Textbooks use formatting like bolding and underlining to make the information perceptually distinctive—you are more likely to remember content that stands out from other information on the page. Other times, distinctiveness depends upon the context. A snake is often distinctive, but not if you’re at the zoo in the reptile house.
To aid your memory, you can find ways to make otherwise ordinary information more distinctive. Highlighting text is one method to achieve perceptual distinctiveness, and it can provide benefits to memory compared to passively reading the material. But do so in moderation—it is no longer distinctive if you’ve highlighted the whole page. Saying some content aloud can also make it more distinctive. Again, this doesn’t work if you say everything aloud, but if there are key concepts that you want to commit to memory, or certain takeaway messages that you want to be sure to remember in a presentation, saying them aloud can help to commit them to memory and keep them there.8 So, as you continue reading this book, perhaps you’ll be inspired to highlight some phrases or say aloud an interesting point that you hope to retain in memory long after you’ve finished the book. (And if you’re specifically trying to learn material in depth, look to Chapter 23 for even more effective ways of studying material than highlighting.)
