by Meik Wiking
I had heard many of the stories before, but seeing the places where they took place made them come even more to life. And now some of the stories and memories of my father are integrated into the shared memory of a lovely summer afternoon walking around Aarhus. So go for a stroll down memory lane. Either your own or the lane of somebody you love.
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AMBASSADOR ON EGGS—THE POWER OF VISUALIZATION
Imagine you are invited to a dinner party at my place (we are having artichokes and calamari, by the way) and you meet some of my friends.
“This is Mikkel. He’s a doctor and enjoys flying.”
“Hello, nice to meet you, Mikkel.”
“And this is Jess—he owns a clothes brand and is the best skier I know.”
“Good to meet you, Jess.”
“This is Lise. She’s a journalist and plays soccer several times a week.”
“Hi!”
“This is Jens. He’s a lawyer and lives in Beijing.”
“Ah, Beijing. Hi, Jens.”
“And this is Ib. He works in IT and we play tennis twice a week.”
“Hello, nice to meet you.”
“This is Ida. She works in public relations and keeps bees.”
“Wow—bees.”
“And finally, this is Nikolaj. He counts money and has a fruit plantation on the Island of Fejø.”
Now, can you remember the name of the first woman I introduced you to? Maybe not. You may in fact struggle to remember any of the names but have an easier time remembering their professions or hobbies.
This is known as the Baker–baker paradox. If we are introduced to someone named Mr. Baker, we are less likely to remember the name than we are to remember the profession if we are introduced to a baker. If someone is a baker, we can create an image of that person pouring flour, kneading the bread, wearing a tall white hat.
We have already formed a lot of associations with “a baker”—perhaps even multisensory experiences. We have smelled a bakery and eaten freshly baked bread. We can visualize what the baker does. The name Baker is just a bunch of letters. Names are essentially random syllables, a meaningless soup of sounds.
Perhaps, therefore, it is also easier to remember that Mikkel is a doctor and that Nikolaj owns a fruit plantation than the fact that Ib works in IT and Ida in public relations. It is easier to imagine Mikkel performing an operation or to visualize Nikolaj’s apples trees than to form an image of what it looks like when Ida “does public relations.”
Cicero, the Roman statesman, philosopher and orator, once wrote, “The keenest of all our senses is the sense of sight, and consequently perceptions received by the ears or from other sources can most easily be remembered if they are conveyed to our minds by the mediation of vision.”
In the summer of 2016 I was in Kuala Lumpur for a presentation and was invited for a dinner with the Danish ambassador and his wife. I had begun researching memory at the time and the conversation fell upon that subject. We discussed how difficult it can be to remember names and how visualization can help.
Their surname is Ruge—which in Danish means “to hatch.” In addition, I have two friends with the same first names as the ambassador and his wife—Nikolaj and Astrid—so it was an easy picture for me to create: my friends Nikolaj and Astrid sitting on top of some eggs. Because of that image, I still remember the name of the ambassador and his wife today—but I’ve forgotten other names I’ve heard more recently. That is just one small example of how visualization works and how superior our visual memory is to our verbal memory. This is something that has been explored by Lionel Standing, professor of psychology at Bishops University in Canada.
In 1973, Standing conducted a range of experiments exploring human memory. The participants were shown pictures or words and instructed to pay attention to them and try to memorize them for a test on memory. Each picture or word was shown once, for five seconds.
The words had been randomly selected from the Merriam-Webster dictionary and were printed on 35mm slides—words like “salad,” “cotton,” “reduce,” “camouflage,” “ton.”
The pictures were taken from 1,000 snapshots—most of them from holidays—beaches, palm trees, sunsets—volunteered by the students and faculty at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, where Standing taught at the time. But some of the pictures were more vivid—a crashed plane, for instance, or a dog holding a pipe. But remember: this was the seventies—all dogs smoked pipes back then.
Two days later the participants were shown a series of two snapshots or two words at a time, one from the stack of snapshots they had seen before and one new, and were asked which one looked more familiar.
The experiment showed that our picture memory is superior to our verbal memory. When the learning set is 1,000 words selected from the dictionary above, we remember 62 percent of them, while 77 percent of the 1,000 selected snapshots were remembered. The bigger the learning set, the smaller the recognition rate. So, for instance, if the learning set for pictures were increased to 10,000, the recognition rate dropped to 66 percent. However, we remember snapshots better than we do words. That may be why you might be better at remembering faces than names. So, if you are introduced to Penelope, it might help you remember her name if you picture Penelope Cruz standing next to her.
In addition, if more vivid pictures were presented, rather than the routine snapshots, recognition jumped to 88 percent for 1,000 pictures. The more bizarre the image—like my friends roosting on eggs—the more memorable it is. Again, the funnier, the naughtier or the more taboo filled, the more memorable. So keep that in mind when you picture Penelope Cruz standing next to the Penelope you have just met.
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HAPPY MEMORY TIP:
DESCRIBE THE WHOLE SCENE
If you keep a diary, note down impressions from all your senses.
When I make deposits in my memory bank, I make sure to deposit the good ones so that, in the future, I’m more likely to make withdrawals of happiness. All our senses can take us back to the past—to a time and a place where we were happy—and they can work as triggers to do just that. So remember to include impressions from all your senses if you are keeping a diary.
Last year, I was lucky enough to spend a few days with my friends John and Millie. John is one of the editors of the World Happiness Report—but if there were a World Kindness Report, John and Millie would come top. These are two of the nicest people I have ever met. This is an entry from my diary. When you read it, remember the Chinese proverb ascribed to Confucius: “The palest ink is better than the best memory.”
Meik Wiking
Hornby Island, Canada,
June 2018
Every evening the deer come. Sometimes they come so close to the house and eat Millie’s flowers on the porch. When the tide is low and the sun is out, seals warm themselves on the small reef and we can hear them from the house.
Hornby Island is on the West Coast in British Columbia. Three ferries and six hours from Vancouver.
Four generations of this family have come here. John’s dad bought the land, and now John and Millie’s children and grandchildren visit. John’s dad donated a large piece of the land to the state to be used as a public park—now known as Helliwell Park—because “it was too beautiful not to share.”
When the sun is out, it is warm enough to write outside on the porch. Across the water to the north, there are snow-covered mountain peaks, and when the wind blows I can feel the cool wind on my face.
I am working on the new book. I have no Wi-Fi here and the only distraction is the smell of strawberry jam or rhubarb tart which Millie is preparing. John is also writing—typing hard on the keyboard with two fingers. DAK—DAK—DAK.
Today, we’ve been hiking in the woods—it has a strong scent of what I think was Douglas fir—looking for eagles’ nests, and Millie has been tending her garden—the biggest I’ve seen in a long time. She grows tomatoes, artichokes, bell
peppers, raspberries, apples and pears, to name just a few. Everything is fenced to keep the deer out.
In the evening, we drink white wine and eat crab and asparagus and talk about Paris, politics and potato salad—and everything in between.
Chapter III
Invest Attention
In A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes tells Dr. Watson that he considers the human brain to be like an empty attic.
He can stock it with the furniture of his choice, but there is limited space. So if one memory or piece of knowledge goes in, another one has to go out. In order to make room to remember what Holmes considers important information, for example how wounds made by different weapons look and how various poisons work, he gets rid of unimportant things such as the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun.
“You see, but you do not observe,” Holmes lectures Watson in A Scandal in Bohemia.
“The distinction is clear. For example, you have frequently seen the steps which lead up from the hall to this room.”
“Frequently.”
“How often?”
“Well, some hundreds of times.”
“Then how many are there?”
“How many? I don’t know.”
“Quite so! You have not observed. And yet you have seen. That is just my point. Now, I know that there are seventeen steps, because I have both seen and observed.”
Holmes highlights the important difference between seeing and observing when it comes to memory. Observing requires attention. We see lots of things that we don’t register and can’t recall. We observe when we register it and can recall it later. However, Holmes is not right when it comes to the limited space. Our memory is not a small attic but a large warehouse.
And going back to counting, I need you to go online for a minute. Google “Selective Attention Test”—and watch the video. You will be instructed to count how many times the players wearing white pass the basketball. Watch it—it takes about one minute—and come back.
Thanks for coming back. So, I guess the question is: Did you spot the gorilla? For those of you who didn’t take the test, here’s what happens. As I mentioned, you are asked to count the number of times the people wearing white in the video pass a basketball. There are three people wearing white, three people wearing black and two balls in play. The people in black pass one ball to each other and the people in white pass a second ball to each other. They all walk around each other, moving into gaps in the six-man crowd, passing the balls. You’re counting the passes of the team in white, but around ten seconds in a person dressed in a full gorilla suit (let’s just call him the gorilla from here on) walks in from the right of the screen. All the players continue to pass the ball as if nothing has happened. The gorilla walks slowly through the players, stops in the middle, beats its chest and walks out.
When I first watched the video, I knew what the experiment was really meant to demonstrate and I couldn’t believe it when I read that more than half the time those watching and counting don’t see the gorilla at all.
Even when participants are told about the gorilla in the video, they are convinced that there’s no way such a ridiculous thing could have happened without them noticing. “A man in a gorilla suit pounding his chest?” they say. “Yeah, I would totally have noticed that.” We are not only blind to the obvious but blind to our own blindness.
The video was made in 1999 by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, both professors in psychology, at the University of Illinois and Union College, respectively. According to Simons, “Our intuition is that we will notice something that is that visible, that is that distinctive, and that intuition is consistently wrong.” The point is, we are only taking in details from a tiny subset of the world we are experiencing. Other studies replicating the original study confirm the findings.
We are constantly bombarded by signals from our senses. At this moment, I am at a hotel breakfast in Tokyo. For the past hour, I have been focused on this page and I have been blocking out what has been happening around me—but as I try to be more conscious of my surroundings, I can smell the cooking from the omelette station nearby. There are two Spanish businessmen at the next table discussing how much they can invoice their client. The music is upbeat and broken up by the noise of the cutlery being used by those guests not using chopsticks. From my table I can see the Tokyo skyline, with the Rainbow Bridge flashing lights every second. I’ve been sitting in the same position for a couple of hours and I notice that the chair is starting to hurt my legs. There are sights, smells, sounds, sensations, but in each one of my sensory systems there is a vast amount of input that is being processed and filtered.
The process is called selective filtering, or selective attention, and we do it all the time. We pay attention only to a small part of the information we receive and throw the rest away. As Sherlock Holmes would put it, we see but we do not observe. Everything that people recalled in the Happy Memory Study we conducted was something they had noticed, paid attention to, observed—that is why the ingredient of attention registered as 100 percent in the overview. It is perhaps less of an ingredient and more the baking tray—the very foundation.
It can be surprising how much of the world we see and yet do not take in. Not just the number of steps from the hall or chest-pounding gorillas in ball games but also how our food actually tastes, how the seasons are slowly changing or how the rain smells on a hot summer’s day.
It may be a cliché to say you should stop and smell the roses, but research suggests it’s good advice to increase your satisfaction with life. One study by professor of psychology Nancy Fagley at Rutgers University examined eight aspects of appreciation, including awe, or feeling a sense of connection to nature or life itself, and found it connected with happiness among the 250 participants.
But our attention is a currency. It is finite, a limited resource which we can allocate. We pay attention to something. Our attention is a coveted and lucrative market. And these days it seems that the most precious real estate is our eyes. While Netflix declares that sleep is their biggest competitor, marketing agencies are on the lookout for the last bits of our unharvested awareness.
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Advertisements go up on the toilet door, the escalator handrail, the back of the school report card and in the seconds before you can type in your pin code at the ATM. Airlines show ads in the inflight movies—except if you travel business class. The ad-free experience is the new luxury good.
You are working on chopping down your to-do list, you check your phone, reply to Karen’s message, check Facebook—aw, cute puppy video!—return to your to-do list, your phone pings, it’s Karen, you reply that “Monday is fine,” you open your calendar, remember the meeting you have on Monday and add “prepare presentation” to your to-do list. Sound familiar?
So what happens with our memory when our attention is being attacked by all these weapons of mass distraction and when we mass-multitask?
Well, first of all, there might not be such a thing as multitasking. We are not doing several things at once—we switch back and forth between several tasks and where we focus our attention.
One recent meta study published in 2018 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences summarizes a decade of research done on the link between multitasking and cognition, including memory and attention (“Minds and Brains of Media Multitaskers: Current Findings and Future Directions” by Anthony D. Wagner, professor of psychology at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Memory Laboratory, and Melina R. Uncapher, assistant professor in the Department of Neurology at the University of California, San Francisco).
According to the meta study, across the literature the emerging trend is that people who multitask perform significantly worse on memory tasks. This, however, was not found in every study. Roughly half the studies examined showed no significant difference, but the other half showed that heavy multitaskers are significantly underperforming when it comes to attention and
memory. In addition, not a single published study showed a positive effect on memory from multitasking.
We have no data on how often our hunter-gatherer ancestors were distracted. (The gatherers gathering data were not popular in the earliest tribes.) However, I believe one can argue that smartphones have become weapons of mass distraction in the past decade. In 2018, research from the UK’s telecom regulator, Ofcom, cited in the Guardian showed that people are checking their smartphones every twelve minutes during their waking hours.
So yes, it seems plausible that we are less likely to remember—or at least pay attention—in the era of mass distraction.
THE HIPPO IN THE DIRECTOR’S CHAIR
We have one hippocampus on each side of our brain and they are the parts of the limbic system that are concerned with our emotions, behavior and long-term memory.
You will find them above your ears, about 5 centimeters in. Look for something that looks a bit like a seahorse.
The hippocampus plays a vital role in the consolidation of information from your short-term to your long-term memory and in the retrieval of memories. Your long-term memory is not one place in your brain, it is distributed across several locations, but the hippocampus gathers all the different bits that go into one memory. Think of it as the director that re-creates the scene, using the actors, the lighting, the sounds, the script, and so on. If you need a picture to remember this, just imagine a hippo in a director’s chair. The director receives input from other parts of the brain. What were the sensory inputs of touch, sound, sight, taste and smell in the memory? What did I feel about the whole thing? Here is where the amygdala comes in. You have two, they are shaped like almonds and you use them for decision-making, responses and the memory of emotions. Was I scared or angry? The amygdala will let the hippocampus know what the emotional significance of particular stimuli are and how you felt. Different parts of the brain work seamlessly together to re-create a memory: Quiet on set! Lights. Roll camera. Action!