The Art of Making Memories

by Meik Wiking

  Furthermore, the processes of remembering our past experiences and imagining future ones are governed by the same part of the brain. Brain scans show that thinking about the past and the future activate roughly the same areas of the brain. Our memories shape our hopes and our dreams for the future.

  CONTEXT TRIGGERS—WHY WALKING THROUGH DOORS AFFECTS YOUR MEMORY

  We’ve all been there: you’re at home, sitting in front of your computer, you get up because you have to consult the letter on the kitchen table.

  You go to the kitchen, only to stand there, not knowing why you came in. You open the fridge. No, that wasn’t it. You go back to your computer—and remember. Oh yes, the letter.

  This is a common short-term memory failure. It may not have to do with lack of attention but merely with the fact that you are walking through a doorway. The phenomenon of going into a room only to forget why you went in there is known as the “doorway effect.”

  In 2011, a team of psychologists at the University of Notre Dame in the US published the paper “Walking through Doorways Causes Forgetting.” (No spoiler warning in academia, it seems. The team of researchers might have renamed The Sixth Sense “Boy sees dead people. Man realizes he is dead people.”)

  “Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an “event boundary” in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,” explained Gabriel Radvansky, one of the researchers behind the study, to Live Science.

  In other words, the idea is that the act of walking through the doorway makes the brain believe that a new scene has begun and that there is no need for memories from the old scene.

  In the study, Radvansky and his colleagues asked participants to play a video game in which they could move around, pick up objects and move them from one table to another. That was the task. When they were moving the objects, the objects were in their virtual backpack and thus invisible to the participants.

  Sometimes the participants had to move the objects to a table in the same room and sometimes to a table in a different room (but the same distance away). In another version of the study, the participants were carrying real objects in shoe boxes (to keep them hidden) between actual tables in the lab. From time to time, the researchers asked the participants what they were carrying in their virtual backpack or shoe box.

  The conclusion: the man had been dead the whole time and only the boy could see him—sorry, I mean, walking through doorways causes forgetting. Surprise!

  In another experiment, conducted by Baddeley and Godden, both professors of psychology at the University of Sterling at the time, divers had to memorize a list of words in two different environments, one underwater and one on land. Underwater, the learning took place around 6 meters below the surface. They had to memorize thirty-eight unrelated words—one word every four seconds—which they heard twice during the learning stage (the divers underwater had a communication device).

  Twenty-four hours later, the participants had to recall the words from the list either in the environment where they had learned it, or in the other context. What Godden and Baddeley found was that the list of words memorized underwater were best recalled underwater, and the lists of words learned on land were best recalled on land. Recall was approximately 50 percent better when the learning and recall context were the same.

  It was only a small experiment, with eighteen divers, and was conducted in 1975. But we know today that our memory works better in certain contexts. Recall of memories is most effective when the conditions at the time of encoding—when the memory was made—match the conditions at the time of retrieval. That is why the police may bring a witness to the scene of the crime for an interview. This is known as “the encoding specificity principle,” a term coined by Endel Tulving (yes—him again).

  Tulving’s theory emphasizes the importance of cues in retrieving and gaining access to episodic memories. We remember things by association. As a consequence, forgetting may be caused by a simple lack of appropriate cues that spark the memory.

  The cue may be a memento or the mental state of the individual. But language also matters. Memories are better recalled when interviews are conducted in the language that was spoken when the memories took place. In one study, researchers interviewed bilingual participants in both English and Russian. When the participants were cued with Russian words, participants recalled memories that occurred in a Russian-speaking environment, and when presented with English cues they recalled memories that took place in an English-speaking environment. This underlines the importance of being in the right environment if you want to retrieve and hold on to happy memories. So you might want to revisit some of the scenes of the happiest times you have had.

  HAPPY MEMORY TIP:

  PAY ATTENTION TO WHERE YOU PAY YOUR ATTENTION

  An evening or weekend of digital detox may make things more memorable.

  In the Happy Memory Study we conducted at the Happiness Research Institute, several people mentioned experiences that had occurred when they were without power or an internet connection. One family experienced being without electricity one evening. They brought out candles and spent the evening telling their favorite family stories.

  A thirty-year-old woman from the UK shared the following happy memory:

  It was a bank holiday and so my boyfriend and I went away hiking for the long weekend, but there was a storm on the second day. We braved the rain in our waterproof hiking clothes for about three hours, then, wet and cold, we came back to our B&B and played Scrabble in the living room. It was just the two of us; it was very cosy, warm and dry. The wet hike was still pleasant, but this contrast made me feel relaxed and more rested. I love Scrabble as well, and we never play as we don’t have it at home and, ordinarily, my boyfriend wouldn’t want to play a board game. This time, there was nothing else to do on a stormy afternoon so it worked out well for me.

  Being without our phones or without electricity can make us pay attention. With no phones and no TV, there are fewer sirens luring us in and grabbing our focus and we are more in control of where we place our attention. The Center for Humane Technology in the US has been pushing for realigning technology with humanity’s best interests, advocating technology that protects our minds and design that aligns more with how we want to live. Here are some of their suggestions of how to live more intentionally with your devices:

  Turn off all notifications Press. Me. Now. The red dots want your attention. Go to settings—remove all notifications.

  Go greyscale Uh, shiny, bright colors! In the settings, you can adjust the digital candy to look less appetizing.

  Try keeping your home screen to tools only Reserve your home screen for essential tools such as maps, camera and calendar. Move the attention grabbers off the first page or into folders.

  Launch other apps by typing it in Search intentionally for the app you want to open instead of having it stare suggestively at you on the home screen.

  Send audio notes or call instead of texting It is less stressful to say it than to type it. It is also a richer form of communication. The tone of your voice also gives valuable information.

  As we shall see later, today we have great opportunities to outsource our memory to photographs. But, however convenient snapping pictures throughout our holidays might be, it may also mean that you are not paying attention. If you see something without attention, there is less of a chance that you will remember it.

  Amy DiLorenzo/Getty Images

  MY STRUGGLE—WITH ATTENTION

  “So what did you talk about?”

  One rainy evening in Vancouver, I was sitting across from George Akerlof, an American professor of economics, talking about why we remember what we remember—and there was a lot to draw on. George was born in 1940. He remembered he was standing in the hallway when he heard the news that Bobby Kennedy had been shot. He remembered being tear-gassed at Berkeley during the Vietnam War demonstrations in ’69. And he remembered meeting his wife.

  They first m
et at a going-away party, but they didn’t speak; the second time they met they were placed at the same table and spoke all night. So I was curious. “What did you talk about?” My expectations for the answer were high. George has a brilliant mind—and a Nobel Prize in Economics to prove it.

  “I don’t remember. The stuff you talk about when you meet somebody you like for the second time.” George could probably sense my disappointment. “If I was a novelist, I could tell you.” He said, “Karl Ove Knausgård could tell you.” Karl Ove Knausgård is the Norwegian author who wrote the autobiographical books My Struggle. Six books: 3,600 pages.

  “Yes, I remember reading three detailed pages about how he was washing potatoes one time,” I said.

  “You and I collapse the memory into one thing—but novelists remember every detail.”

  Alena Haurylik/Shutterstock

  Maybe George was onto something; Hemingway once wrote that what made a good book was the accuracy of the details which made it believable.

  “You’re on the third floor, right?” I asked later. Akerlof and I were staying at the same hotel and had taken the elevator together before.

  “No, I’m on five, you’re on six.”

  If you’re keeping score, that’s Nobel laureate, 1; me, 0.

  Since then, I have tried to collect more details from moments where I feel happy, moments I want to remember.

  He had the lobster. I had the fish. I forget which. But it was delicious.

  svetikd/Getty Images

  HAPPY MEMORY TIP:

  TREAT HAPPY MEMORIES AS YOU WOULD YOUR DATE

  Pay attention!

  “The true art of memory,” wrote Samuel Johnson, the British writer who compiled the Dictionary of the English Language in the eighteenth century, “is the art of attention.”

  Imagine you are out on a first date with someone. You are not just seeing, you are observing.

  You notice the color of their eyes, the sound of their laugh—maybe even the scent of their perfume when you first said hello. You notice things like, when they get excited about a conversation, they use their hands a lot. You might even pick up on the subtle things like how their voice changes depending on the theme of the conversation, or how they slow dance in their chair if the food is especially good.

  In other words, gorillas might be dining at the next table but you are paying full attention to your date. This is good. Let the gorillas have their romantic time on their own—you want to remember your happy moment. So harvest the details when you are making memories—the happy memories. Remember the hippo in the director’s chair? You have to give it something to work with. So pay attention to the different elements that can go into the scene. What music is playing in the background? Or, if you were to describe the room in a novel, what would you write? Feed the hippo.

  Chapter IV

  Create Meaningful Moments

  We remember when we pay attention—and we pay attention when we are present, engaged, committed, when what we see and process is meaningful to us.

  As we saw in the last chapter, just being exposed to something does not mean we will remember it. If it is not important—not meaningful to us—we are less likely to notice it, process it, encode it, store it.

  If you don’t believe me, then tell me how many horizontal lines there are on your right palm. You have probably seen your palm many times but have failed to notice and then recall how many horizontal lines there are on it. That is a good thing, because the number of lines on your right palm is not meaningful, important information.

  You seldom introduce yourself with “Hi. My name is Sandra. I have three horizontal lines on my right palm.” If you do, then I have to make an important phone call and you’ll have to excuse me for a minute.

  But if you are into reading palms and believe that, according to chiromancy, a long and curvy heart line (the top one) means that you are good at expressing your emotions, then you might remember how your palm looks. If those lines were meaningful to us, we would pay attention to them and remember them.

  THE BIG DAYS

  Many of us are familiar with the daily grind, with routine: wake up, eat breakfast, commute to work, work, commute home, eat dinner, watch Netflix, go to bed, repeat.

  It’s easy to lose track of those days. What people remember are the big days in their life: the milestones we pass, the moments where we experience a sense of meaning, a sense of connection with our loved ones, with the world and with life itself. In the Happy Memory Study, 37 percent of the memories we analyzed were meaningful, for example, “the day I got married,” “walking on the beach with my husband on a trip to celebrate our anniversary,” “the birth of my son,” “going to the beach with my grandfather on a Saturday morning,” “a thank-you letter from my daughter,” “having my son (adopted), our first trip, taking him home 200 kilometers on the highway on a snowy winter afternoon.” Our collection of happy memories is packed with life’s “big” moments.

  One of the most touching memories came from a woman in her forties who thought back more than a decade ago to her grandmother’s memorial service. She was walking hand in hand with her niece on a beach. It was one of those rare but gorgeous winter days. “There I was with my beloved tiny niece, who was the most precious person to me in the world, and I just felt so alive and grateful to have known my granny, and there we were, treading on, my niece and I, the next generations moving forth into the world.”

  These meaningful moments are also the ones held by the wealthiest 1 percent—the wealthiest of the wealthy—at least in Denmark. Last year, Michael Birkjær, one of my awesome colleagues, was invited to speak to the top earners in Denmark and conducted a small survey among them. Their happiest days were about connecting with people, about loved ones, about making sense of it all.

  NadyaEugene/Shutterstock

  THE CONNECTIONS

  There is no doubt that some of our most meaningful and memorable moments are when we connect with other people.

  And it does not have to be the big days, the weddings and births. It can also be the connections we form on a daily basis. The tiny moments which may go unnoticed or seem insignificant to others can be those moments that never leave us, those moments when the small things in life turn out to be the big things in life.

  “The moment my daughter looked up to me to say, “I’m so happy,” for the first time.”

  “This morning, feeling my husband coming to bed and spooning me from behind, very tightly. Then our dog joining us and licking us both.”

  “We were four friends playing in the streets in Bogotá, Colombia. Afterwards, when we were tired of playing, we shared one Coke and some bread.”

  “My colleagues decorated my workspace because they knew I was having a hard time and it would cheer me up.”

  These thousands of moments shape our common stories. These moments are the atoms of our relationships. The thing you notice when you read or listen to people’s happy memories is how often people play a part in them—many people: grandfathers, nephews, friends, daughters, parents, boyfriends, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, sons, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, husbands and wives.

  Our loved ones seem to be the ones we remember best and we search to hold happy memories of them.

  Happy memories of times spent with other people give us comfort. That is why, when we feel lonely, we are more prone to be nostalgic.

  Earlier, I mentioned that there is a growing body of evidence that nostalgia produces positive feelings, boosts our self-esteem and our sense of being loved, while reducing negative feelings such as loneliness and meaninglessness.

  Researchers at Southampton University created an experiment where the participants were asked to read stories either about sad events (like the 2004 tsunami) or happy events (the birth of a polar bear) to put them into either a negative or a positive mood. The researchers found that a negative mood is more likely to cause nostalgia than a positive mood.

  In addition, the researchers asked the part
icipants to fill in a personality test, but the researchers had skewed the questions so that their answers would make the participants believe that they were scoring high on loneliness. The study showed that those participants who had been put into a negative mood—because of the negative stories or the personality test demonstrating their loneliness—were more likely to engage in nostalgia, to look back on times when they were happy and surrounded by loved ones. This strategy of mood regulation worked, as they subsequently reported feeling less sad and lonely.

  In the study we conducted at the Happiness Research Institute we found stories which support this. One woman in her twenties told us about a happy memory which had taken place a few years ago. She had been bundled up with a group of high school friends on a frozen lake with a flask of hot chocolate, telling stories and trying to open a bottle of wine with a sports shoe.

  Sounds like a fun night indeed. When she answered the follow-up question of why she thought she remembered that event, she told us that she likes invoking that feeling of coziness, and that she misses being close to more people, as she was then. And she is not alone in having nostalgic memories. In our Happy Memory Study, we received both heartwarming and heartbreaking stories, stories of love and stories of lost love.

  Sometimes happy memories can feel bittersweet. The classic 1942 film Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, is a perfect example of the bittersweetness of memory.