Why We Forget and How to Remember Better, page 11
Involve the Senses
Another way you can make information stand out is by linking it to your senses. Give information musicality: Create a jingle to help you remember the information, or notice the rhythmicity of the syllables in someone’s name. Construct a mental image: Imagine what someone’s name would look like in neon letters. Rather than trying to memorize that you parked on level 3H by repeating it over and over, think about writing a huge letter H on a sign, and notice the three brush strokes you took to form the letter. Or think of three smelly Hyenas sitting in your car. The more sensory dimensions you can give to a memory, the greater the likelihood you will create a lasting memory trace.
Important to You
Your memories are importantly linked to your self-concept—after all, your memory is about what happened to you in the past—and therefore information that you can relate to yourself is more likely to be remembered. We often struggle to learn information when we can’t imagine how it intersects with our life.
Perhaps you’re trying to memorize a series of historical events and you can’t see why you should need to know this information. Figure out ways to make the information relevant to you. Imagine you are planning a visit to this country, and spend time thinking about how the historical chain of events you’re learning shaped it into the country it is today. Although it may seem like these efforts are taking time away from your studying, in reality, by making the information relevant to something you care about, you will likely find it easier to hold on to the content. So, whether you’re trying to understand a chapter in your biochemistry textbook or working to memorize the names of the people you will meet at an upcoming social event, try linking the content to something important to you.
Remember the FOUR Principles
Other cues to importance come from the same processes that we’ve already talked about earlier in this chapter as benefiting encoding:
Focus attention on the new information.
Organize the content.
Understand its meaning.
Relate the new information to your existing knowledge.
By doing these things you will increase the likelihood that you will initially encode a memory and also that your brain will successfully store it.
Forgetting Isn’t Always Bad
Do you wish you could simply take a pill and have the superpower to remember everything? Given the extensive marketing of so-called memory-enhancing vitamins, herbs, supplements, and nutritional drinks, you might think that if such a pill really existed, you should jump at the chance to take it. But while it is easy to think of forgetting as a “glitch,” and to imagine the ideal memory system as one that would retain all details, there turn out to be important benefits to forgetting. In fact, just like storage, forgetting is both an active process some of the time and also one that is essential for memory to serve its purpose.9
To understand why a memory system that forgets might be more beneficial than one that stores everything, we need to consider why you benefit from memory at all. It may seem obvious that you have memory so that you can know what happened to you in the past. But then again, how useful is it for you to be able to revisit some past moment in time?
Memory for the Future
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, there’s a terrific exchange between Alice and the Queen, where the Queen states, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” It was an insightful statement that Carroll wrote 150 years ago. Although we tend to think of memory as the ability to hold on to the past, the actual benefits of memory come from its power to allow us to make sense of the present moment and to creatively, flexibly plan for the future.10
Individuals with amnesia, such as Henry described in Chapter 1, not only can’t remember what happened to them yesterday or last year, but they also have difficulty imagining what will happen to them tomorrow or next year. If we don’t have any episodic memories of past events, then we have nothing to use to help us imagine possible future scenarios. It is because our minds are replete with memories that we can imagine and plan for future events. Even if you’ve never departed from a particular airport before, you can estimate how much time you need to clear security and reach your gate because you remember approximately how long it took in all the other airports you have departed from. Your gist memories from those prior events give you the information you need to make a wise decision.
Let’s dive into this example and consider the content you need to remember to help you make decisions about a future, yet-to-be-experienced scenario. When trying to decide when to leave for the airport, it would be quite inefficient for you to have to sift through your memory for every past airport you’ve been in, recalling all the details such as gate numbers, flight times, number of people in the security line, and the color of the flight attendants’ uniforms. You don’t need any of those details to guide your decision. There will not be exactly the same number of people in the security line as the last time you were at an airport (and even if there were, the time they take wouldn’t be the same). Rather than getting bogged down in those details, you need a system that enables you to quickly abstract a representation—a schema—of a “generic airport” that is built from your prior experiences but is unlike any particular event you’ve experienced before.
Forgetting allows us to more easily form abstracted representations; forgetting forces you to quickly—and effortlessly—“see the forest for the trees” because the details of the trees are gone. This loss of details can also make it easier for you to appreciate the interconnections and similarities between prior places and events: how most airports’ security lines are set up similarly, how departure gates are numbered, and other features that airports share. As the high-resolution details of events are lost, similar events begin to resemble one another more. So, although there are some benefits to remembering most of your past, there also can be pitfalls to having a memory system that doesn’t prioritize forgetting.
How Not to Forget
Although forgetting isn’t always a bad thing, there are, of course, many times when you’ve devoted substantial effort to getting details into your memory and you’d like to keep them there. None of us want to end up in the situation described at the start of this chapter—fumbling over a presentation because we’ve forgotten key points that we intended to communicate.
So, how do we keep from forgetting content that we want to retain?
• Use effort to help you learn and remember the FOUR principles of learning.
◦ Focus attention on the content you want to remember.
• If you find your attention drifting, direct it back to the material or experience you wish to remember.
• Focus on what your friend is telling you, and try to ignore everything else.
• Help yourself to stay alert by sitting up straight in class.
• And make sure you get enough sleep!
◦ Organize the material in ways that it will be easier to remember.
• Before trying to memorize your notes, spend a few moments organizing them into categories or groups that will be easier to remember. Do the same thing with each of the groups, to make them organized as well.
• Chunk a credit card number that you’re trying to commit to memory into a series of dates or scores in basketball games.
• If you’re trying to relearn the names of all your old high school friends for your upcoming reunion, try to remember them by the different groups or social circles that you knew them (glee club, soccer team, math class, etc.).
◦ Understand what you want to remember.
• If you’re studying material, make sure you understand the frameworks, concepts, and details you’re trying to learn.
• If you’re living through a moment you hope to remember, think about the meaning of what is happening around you.
◦ Relate the information to things you already know, or topics you care about.
• Trying to memorize an address? Turn the number, street, and town into three concepts that you’re familiar with. For example, for 42 Maple Street, Cooperstown, think of Jackie Robinson’s jersey number, the large maple tree in the park across the street, and “barrel-making town” (if you happen to know that coopers are people trained to make barrels).
• Trying to learn a new computer program or smartphone application? Think about how the electronic steps might be analogous to things you’re more familiar with, such as moving paper or other physical objects around and manipulating them.
• Make information stand out.
◦ Imbue it with emotion.
• Don’t just read the historical facts on the page; think about how it would have felt to live through those times.
• Feel the fear, doubt, grief, or triumph of the people in that news story you want to remember to tell your friend.
◦ Make it distinctive.
• Say a person’s name aloud.
• Highlight text on a page.
• Create your own figures, diagraming relations among concepts or timelines of events.
◦ Involve the senses.
• Give new dimensions to the words on the page. Smell the gunpowder of the revolutionary battle. Hear the chanting voices of thousands of protesters demanding their rights.
• Imagine the person’s name written in large, colorful letters.
• If you compose a catchy jingle or rhyme, you’ll remember that content for a very long time.
• Construct mental images. Want to remember the town “Hopkinton”? Picture your cousin (your “kin”) hopping onto a one-ton weight.
◦ Make it important to you.
• Trying to memorize the locations of historical events? Imagine yourself traveling to each location.
• Imagine using the knowledge gained at a conference to solve a problem your company faces.
• Think of the joy a friend will feel when you remember the dates of an upcoming vacation and follow up with her afterwards.
• Build a strong memory.
◦ Memories tend to become less vivid over time, but you can build up a memory that will retain the important details. One way to retain those details is to study them multiple times, and in multiple ways.
• When memorizing names before an event, you don’t have to choose between writing the names out, thinking of associations you have with the names, or setting them to song. You can do all of these things! The more of them you do, the greater the likelihood that you will remember the names when the time comes.
• If you’re trying to remember historical events, don’t just look at them from one perspective; think about how each party would view the event.
• When learning a biochemical pathway, think what would happen if different parts of the system broke down because an enzyme was malfunctioning or the substrate was missing. Which substances would accumulate and which would run out?
9
Retrieve that memory
You studied hard. You drew out diagrams and created your own flashcards. Yet, here you are, staring at a short-answer question on the exam and drawing a complete blank. You know you’ve generated this content from memory before, but you can’t bring it to mind right now. You feel your heart racing faster as you try the next question, but it’s the same problem—you’re sure you know the answer, but you just can’t think of it!
Why Do These Failures of Memory Happen?
A lot has to go right for memory to succeed. You have to get the information into your memory and keep it there (as we covered in Chapter 8), and you also need to bring that information back out when relevant. Sometimes everything works seamlessly, and the content you need comes to mind easily. But, at other times, memory retrieval is more like bobbing for apples: The content you’re searching for may be there, but no matter how hard you try, you cannot access it.
Retrieval failures are fairly common. At one time or another, we have all found ourselves searching for the name of an acquaintance or looking into our pantry trying to remember what we were going to get. Usually, this knowledge returns at a later moment—often when it is no longer of use to us. We think of the name once we’re out of earshot or remember that we wanted to check whether we had enough pasta only after we begin preparing the sauce. Because the knowledge does eventually return to mind, we know the failure wasn’t in getting information into memory, it was in getting the information back out. It was a failure of retrieval from memory.
Constructing a Memory
Despite being so common, these memory retrieval failures often catch us off guard. In part, this may be because many of us rely on misleading metaphors to understand how memory works. If we think of memories as if they are books stored in a library or papers stored in a file cabinet, then retrieval failures should be relatively uncommon. But the truth is that there isn’t “a memory” sitting somewhere in our brains waiting to be rediscovered. As we mentioned in the last chapter, a better metaphor for memory might be a structure built from blocks. The building blocks (brain cells and connections between them) are assembled as an event is experienced and stored as a memory. This memory “structure” does not, however, stay glued together in your brain. It is quickly disassembled so that other memories can be formed with those building blocks; only the “blueprints” (or engram1) of the memory remains. To retrieve the memory, it requires an active process of reassembling those blocks so that the memory can be rebuilt and the past experience can be accessed. If we use this metaphor, it can help us to understand many of the reasons why we can fail to retrieve information that we have initially stored.
Interference
One frequent reason why retrieval fails is because you have some specific information “in mind” that makes it difficult to recall similar material. It’s probably hard to recall what you ate for lunch two Thursdays ago, because your memory for all the lunches before and after it interfere with your ability to retrieve that specific lunch. You can think of it as having built a series of structures that are only subtly different from one another. Soon after building one of those memory structures, it’s fairly easy to rebuild it: You can probably remember what you ate for lunch yesterday afternoon or, with effort, the day before that. But, over time, it becomes much more difficult—or even impossible—to rebuild one specific memory. Interference pushes you to build a prototypical “lunch memory,” making it easier for you to recall where you often sit and who you typically eat with, while simultaneously making it harder to retrieve any specific memory of eating lunch. Having quick access to typical experiences is incredibly important for efficient decision-making—it’s what allows you to generalize from one airport to another, or from one restaurant to another—but it can lead to frustrations when you don’t want the details of a typical airport but instead to remember whether the terminal you are leaving from tomorrow has a restaurant where you can eat a sit-down meal before your flight.
Sometimes you may create your own interference through your efforts to come up with the right content, exacerbating your retrieval problems. As you see your acquaintance approach, you try to generate her name. You may feel that you’re nearly able to retrieve the content—you may be certain that it’s on the “tip of your tongue.”2 You think to yourself, “Is her name Sadie? Or Sarah?” These efforts, while well intentioned, can actually make it harder to retrieve the correct name (Sally). You have inadvertently blocked the desired content by bringing to mind similar, interfering content.
Interference can also arise from distractions in your environment. When you opened the pantry door to check how much pasta was on the shelf, you may have noticed that a box of cereal was left open. While you closed it—and wondered how many more times you would need to remind your daughter to close the box after breakfast—you forgot the task of checking for pasta. Only later, with another cue (like preparing the pasta sauce) do you remember.
Stress
When you can’t retrieve a memory in the desired moment, it can create stress. You might feel your palms becoming sweaty as you realize you can’t recall the name of your acquaintance who is walking toward you. Unfortunately, stress makes retrieval failures even more likely to arise or to persist. As we discussed in Part 1, the hippocampus, deep in the temporal lobe, stores the blueprints and orchestrates the memory reassembly process. As it guides that reassembly process, the hippocampus also acts like tape, fastening multiple building blocks together to create a memory filled with content that you can consciously access. Stress can be disruptive to the functioning of the hippocampus, making it hard to efficiently rebuild the memory and retrieve the content you’re looking for. Under stress, you might not find the blueprints to begin assembling the memory, or the first blocks you assemble might begin to detach as you attempt to insert additional blocks into your memory structure.
Now, you might be remembering back to Chapter 8 and thinking, “But wait: I thought emotions and stress could be helpful for getting information into my memory!” Indeed, the biochemical environment that is established when you’re stressed seems to help you get at least some critical content into memory, but that same biochemical environment can actually prevent you from getting content back out of memory. When you’re stressed, your brain prioritizes your ability to figure out what’s going on in the environment right now. It deprioritizes those processes that would allow you to gain access to content from a prior moment in time—which is, of course, exactly what you need for memory retrieval to succeed.
