The Art of Making Memories

by Meik Wiking

  The Hedonometer tool takes a daily sample of 50 million tweets and assigns a happiness score for the day based on the language used in those tweets. To some extent, you could say it is the emotional temperature of the world (of Twitter users, at least). Data has been collected since 2009.

  Low points are terrorist attacks and the death of celebrities, while peaks cluster around Christmas, Thanksgiving and Mother’s Day. Some days call for happiness and some call for sadness—but the common denominator is that we are more likely to remember emotional days—at either end of the spectrum.

  Here’s a sample:

  Monday, December 25, 2017

  Christmas Day

  Average happiness: 6.25

  Sunday, May 11, 2014

  Mother’s Day

  Average happiness: 6.14

  Friday, April 29, 2011

  wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton

  Average happiness: 6.08

  Sunday, June 15, 2014

  Father’s Day

  Average happiness: 6.07

  Monday, May 24, 2010

  the TV show Lost aired its final episode the night before

  Average happiness: 6.03

  Tuesday, August 12, 2014

  death of actor and comedian Robin Williams

  Average happiness: 6

  Wednesday, November 9, 2016

  election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States

  Average happiness: 5.87

  I think this is a fun tool, but I think it has shortcomings when it comes to a deeper dive into an individual’s experience of their happiness. Some things check out. Monday has a lower happiness score than Friday. But is “gravy” (6.32) really a sadder word than “sandwich” (7.06)? I think that’s quite a controversial scientific standpoint. Nevertheless, the Hedonometer may also point us to dates where people create the strongest memories.

  A FLASH OF REMEMBRANCE

  You probably remember quite vividly where you were when you witnessed 9/11. Or when you heard about the death of Princess Diana, or saw the first Moon landing, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, for that matter.

  They are all likely to be a flashbulb memory if you witnessed them in your lifetime. A flashbulb memory is a snapshot of a moment in time when an important event took place; the term was coined by Harvard psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik in 1977. They believed that when important events happen they are stored in a vivid and detailed way so we can access the memory later on, analyze the experience and perhaps avoid similar events in the future, if the experience was dangerous.

  We often speak of flashbulb memories as national or international events but one study conducted with American university students showed that only 3 percent of their flashbulb memories were such events. The vast majority were personal events. First kisses. Exams. Broken legs.

  Happy events as well as dangerous or traumatic ones are stored as flashbulb memories. In one study exploring flashbulb memories related to the Second World War in Denmark, Dorthe Berntsen and Dorthe K. Thomsen, both professors of psychology at Aarhus University, examined the memories of the reception of the sad news of the Nazi occupation of Denmark in April 1940 and the happy news of the liberation on May 4, 1945. One hundred and forty-five Danes between the ages of seventy-two and eighty-nine were interviewed and their answers were corroborated against objective records—for instance, the weather reports or which day of the week the occupation began. The liberation was broadcast on Radio London, around half past eight in the evening.

  One woman recalls:

  I had been to Tivoli and had met up with a friend from school. We were anticipating that a surrender could happen soon and wanted to go home and listen to the radio from England. But we only made it to Monasvej, when a man came out from restaurant Bastholm and yelled, his arms swinging, “Children, Denmark is free!” I remember that episode as if it was yesterday.

  Ninety-six percent of the participants remembered when they first heard about the German capitulation. Interestingly, a subsample of the participants had reported ties to the Resistance movement in Denmark, and they had more vivid, detailed and accurate memories than did participants without such ties. I imagine the people in the Resistance movement were more emotionally invested and thus have a stronger memory of the German capitulation. This phenomenon is also demonstrated by other studies. The closer our ties are to the event, the better we remember it.

  One study looked at the flashbulb memory of the news of the resignation of Margaret Thatcher among British and non-British people. One year after the British Prime Minister had stepped down, the British participants’ memory of the event was still vivid and accurate, in contrast to the non-British participants, whose memories had faded and who were more prone to reconstructing erroneous versions of the event. The same effect has been found for the details concerning the death of Princess Diana, where people in Britain had a more accurate memory of the events than people in other countries. In addition, the assassination attempts on President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II took place within a few months of each other. However, when asked when they happened, Americans think that the attempted assassination of President Reagan was more recent, while Catholics believe the incident involving the Pope was more recent.

  The events in the study above are sad ones, but the same mechanism also works for happy events. You might feel that your wedding was more recent than your friend’s do. It is the vividness and level of detail in our flashbulb memories that often make us believe that the events took place not as long ago as they actually did.

  So what can we take away from this when it comes to how to make memories? Is the lesson here that we should join the Resistance in case of a Nazi invasion? Well, yes—that, too—but also that, if we want to make memories, we should consider using the emotional highlighter pen. When we have days when we have experienced emotional events—good or bad—we may want to make sure to connect with loved ones and tell them we love them. That is something we all like to remember to do and know that we did. We might also consider doing things that scare us, experiences that get the blood flowing—this wakes up the amygdala and the emotional aspects of these experiences will make them more memorable.

  HAPPY MEMORY TIP:

  DO SOMETHING THAT SCARES YOU

  Stepping out of your comfort zone can be the first step towards making more memories.

  As they move in a silent embrace across the floor, her eyes are closed. A subtle smile plays on her face as she rests her hand on his shoulder. Every woman on the floor seems to be wearing that same smile as the twenty couples circle around the empty spot in the middle where the nonexistent band is playing. The music of Carlos Gardel’s Por una cabeza is filtered through the sound of shoes sliding gently on the floor.

  I grew up in rural Denmark. Men went hunting and fishing—dancing, not so much. In addition, I am a terrible dancer. I genuinely believe that pointy fingers and overbite is a legitimate dance move. Despite all this, a girl I went to university with convinced me to take a tango class. I was completely out of my element.

  There are no fixed steps in tango. You make it up as you go along—walking in a silent embrace with no plan and no words. How do you communicate without words but with balance and pressure? I needed to stop thinking and start sensing.

  In my first lesson the instructor placed a tambourine between my chest and hers and put her mouth so close to my ear I could feel her breath. This was an exercise to teach us men to communicate the direction we were going in through our chest and not with our arms.

  “Press harder, otherwise the tambourine will fall,” the instructor said into my ear. “Harder. Yes, that’s it. Don’t stop. Don’t stop.” It was my first tango lesson—and sparked four years of tango lessons. So, consider what you could do outside your comfort zone and make memories for the future.

  Javier Garcia/Shutterstock

  SOMEBODY I USED TO KNOW

  Wendy Mitchell is from Yorkshire. She worked
for decades as a team leader in the NHS. She was active. She ran. Hiked up mountains. Raised two daughters, Sarah and Gemma, by herself.

  Then, one morning in September 2012, Wendy goes for a run along the Ouse River in York. She trips. Falls hard. Blood flows. She goes to the emergency room and is looked after. Later, she returns to the place along the river where she tripped to try and find the stone or hole that caused her to fall. She recognizes the spot by the blood, but there is no obvious cause for the fall.

  Another run. Another fall. Then another. She feels uneasy. Foggy. Less sharp than usual. She knows something isn’t right. On July 31, 2014, almost two years after her first fall, Wendy is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s.

  Today, she finds writing easier than talking and, with the help of a ghostwriter, she wrote Somebody I Used to Know. It’s a gripping and heartbreaking story—and an insight into what we lose when we lose our memories. It shows the challenges of living with dementia. How finding your way home from your favorite café becomes an issue. Or finding where in the kitchen you keep the tea.

  But it is also an inspirational and heartwarming story. It shows how she’s taken control of her life. Wendy is resilient and resourceful and she is finding ways to outwit the disease for as long as she can.

  She arms herself with stacks of Post-its. An alarm reminds her to take her pills. Pictures on the cupboards show her where the tea is kept. She has bought a pink bike—not because she loves pink but because it is easier to spot and remember. Novels have become impossible to read, so she enjoys poems and short stories instead.

  Agnieszka Lizak/Shutterstock

  But the hardest thing seems to be how dementia steals our cherished memories from us. Every night, a thief steals something more precious than any possession. Wendy tries to fight that, too. She stares at a photograph from 1987. There is a sandy beach. A blue sky. Her two daughters, aged six and three, smiling at the camera. As she tries to memorize every detail, the thought of the day she will no longer recognize those two smiling faces as her daughters’ is heartbreaking.

  She has created a “memory room” with photographs in rows across the walls. She labels them. The “where?”s, the “who?”s, the “why?”s. One row has her daughters, another the places Wendy lived, a third her favorite views—the Lake District and Blackpool Beach.

  “I sit on the edge of the bed in front of them, feeling that same sense of calm and happiness. When the memories have emptied on the inside, they’ll still be here on the outside—a constant, a reminder, a feeling of happier times,” she writes.

  Wendy describes our different memory systems as bookcases. There is a bookcase for facts and a bookcase for emotions. The bookcase for facts is tall and wobbly, with the most recent memories at the top; the emotional bookcase is short but sturdy.

  “We never lose our emotions, because that is a different part of the brain,” Wendy said in an interview on the Guardian book podcast. “Details and facts, we lose every day. For example, I won’t remember what we have talked about here today tomorrow—but I will remember how I felt coming here. The emotional bookcase is important to remember, as people forget who loved ones are. They still have this recognition that there is an emotional attachment.”

  Or, in the words of Maya Angelou, the American poet, singer and civil-rights activist: “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

  Wendy is now an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society. She is committed to helping health-care professionals, caregivers and people living with dementia and she is fighting to reducing the stigma around the disease. You can follow her blog: “Which me am I today” (whichmeamitoday.wordpress.com).

  Anna Grishenko/Shutterstock

  HAPPY MEMORY TIP:

  TEN YEARS’ TIME TEST

  When choosing what to do, take into account what you are most likely to remember in ten years’ time.

  For the past twenty years, I’ve gone sailing with one of my friends, Mikkel, and his dad, Arne. We’ve sailed around the Danish islands, into Swedish fjords and sunk a few Irish coffees on the way. We’ve done this for so many years it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish the trips from each other.

  So this year we decided to do something different. We rented a sailboat in the Adriatic Sea and docked at towns such as Trogir, Milna and Hvar. Towns with narrow streets, towers and keeps, built with stones that glow when the sun sets; towns that could work as the set for King’s Landing in Game of Thrones. This year, Deny, Arnes’s son-in-law, also joined us. His special pirate skill is knowing exactly when the crew is in need of an Aperol spritz.

  Meik Wiking

  One afternoon, as we were approaching Hvar, we dropped anchor in a bay to have lunch and swim. A shoal of small blue fish congregated around the end of our boat. The water was crystal clear and, when we lowered the anchor, we could see it all the way to the bottom of the bay.

  If you look for it on the map (roughly 2 kilometers west of Hvar), the bay looks like the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. So, naturally, we had to name it Jesus’s Bay.

  The next day, after visiting the castle of Hvar, Mikkel and Deny suggested that we rented a jet ski so that we could go back to Jesus’s Bay for the afternoon. Jet skiing had never appealed to me. I am no fan of speed or machines. I am more a difficult-crosswords-and-long-books kind of daredevil. Indeed, I had planned to spend the afternoon on the boat with a book.

  However, when I asked myself, “What are you more likely to remember in ten years?” the jet skis seemed to be the stronger contender. An hour later, we were racing back to Jesus’s Bay, gliding on top of the water, bouncing off every wave, circling the small, uninhabited islands we passed on our way. It was a memorable afternoon. “Each time I got close enough,” Mikkel said to me, “I saw a huge grin on your face.” It was indeed the most fun I had had in a long time.

  We spent the evening drinking rum, listening to Bruce Springsteen and The Rolling Stones, and arguing good-naturedly over whose fault it was that I overturned and fell in the water.

  It was Mikkel’s.

  So, once in a while, when planning your day off, make sure you put the options through the Ten Years’ Time test. What will I remember in a decade?

  Meik Wiking

  Meik Wiking

  USING THE EMOTIONAL HIGHLIGHTER PEN IN SCHOOLS

  The power of the emotional highlighter pen when it comes to memory is now being harnessed by schools aiming to use episodic memory to enhance students’ semantic memory.

  “A girl was taking her exams in history. She was a special-needs student and had not been doing well in her old school,” says Mads, the headmaster of Østerskov Efterskole, a boarding school in Denmark with ninety students. “I think her teacher got a bit nervous when the girl was asked to explain the mechanics of the senate of the Roman Republic. But she clearly outlined the inner workings of the government of ancient Rome and how it connected with the rest of the Roman Republic. She received a grade that would be equivalent to A– in the American grading system.”

  As the student left the exam, the adjudicator asked her, “How did you know all this so well?”

  “It wasn’t difficult,” the girl replied. “I was there.”

  Efterskole is Danish for “after school” and they are independent boarding schools for young people between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. Students can choose to spend one, two or three years finishing their primary education here. Some take it as an extra year after finishing primary school to have a break before they start high school.

  What is special about Østerskov Efterskole is that they use LARP to teach the students. LARP is short for Live Action Roleplaying and could be considered a mix between Dungeons and Dragons and a civil war reenactment.

  Each week there is a theme and the students are assigned a role and a mission. They may be NGOs preparing for a climate conference, trying to influence the lawmakers
of the world. They may find themselves on Wall Street as bankers, as senators in ancient Rome, or Foreign Ministers in Brussels negotiating the future of Europe.

  In the Roman Republic week, the students play members of different noble families in ancient Rome. Their aim is to rise in power and make their mark on history. In maths, students use trigonometry to solve the problem of water supply and to connect Rome with elevated reservoirs via aqueducts.

  In physics, the students learn about metals—their qualities, where they are found and why some are better suited to equip a Roman legion with swords and shields. In German, the students need to buy slaves from a German-speaking slave trader to harvest their fields; this creates an incentive to learn the vocabulary to buy efficient workers. Later that week, their German teacher plays a Gothic warlord presenting territorial claims on behalf of his tribe and the students have to negotiate the terms and conditions of the peace in German.

  Studies led by Lisa Gjedde, professor at the Faculty of Learning and Philosophy at the University of Aalborg, Denmark, show that using LARP improves motivation and long-term memory. Grades either remain the same or are improved by the method.

  HAPPY MEMORY TIP:

  EMBARRASSMENT SHTICK

  Sharing embarrassing stories can make them lose their power.

  I still remember my first days at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Denmark vividly. The building is located by the waterfront in central Copenhagen and filled with iconic Danish design classics. I remember walking down the long carpet-clad hallway on the third floor to my office. I remember meeting Sune, one of my new colleagues, for the first time. This was the office for Africa.