The Hidden Secrets Behind Forming Memories and the Intricacies of Remembering

Joe: So, I've been wondering recently. How much do you remember from our episodes?

Todd: Oh, my goodness. When they come back, it's like an old friend visiting. I don't remember any of that stuff until I hear it again. How about you?

Joe: It's like watching a movie; I'll remember the major points in the emotional barbs, but sometimes I forget the details. Did you ever think that this show would qualify you to do anything?

Todd: No, just to be rich and famous.

Joe:  If you're listening to the show, we are The Re-Engineered You, and we have been doing the show for just over a year. At the end of every show, we say that we are not experts on anything, but we have an opinion on everything. But a couple months ago I was talking to a good friend. Her name is Mitra Sharri. She had an episode on the Filevine. She is the funniest lawyer in Oregon, and that's an actual title you can hold. On her recommendation, I applied to get my private investigators license, which in our state usually requires about 1,500 hours of investigation. That means those applying for it are usually ex-police, lawyers, or people who have spent time in criminal justice. Off the top of your head, can you guess how many of our episodes have delved into criminal psychology or court cases?

Todd: I would say four to six.

Joe: It is closer to a few dozen. Not that the episodes themselves deal exclusively in it, but we have given tons of presentations here and through Toastmasters talking about forms of storytelling, verbal priming, communications, and things that apply to juries. So, I just wanted to share with you today that I have now had my background accepted because of this show and the way we present information. I haven't taken the exam yet - there's a state exam for the legal portion of it, but my hours here and talking/advising people on research we've done qualify me for the pi exam.

Todd: Congratulations! By giving your math, I should at least be able to be a history teacher at a high school, or maybe a community college, because I talked a lot about history.

Joe: Thank you! Now, I was thinking that one thing that we haven't covered on the show yet is little details. So, I wanted to see if you're willing to indulge me in this. In this episode I want to talk about little details, how to memorize little details, and how to see and recognize details. There's a moment in Sherlock Holmes where he is wandering through his Memory Palace, and it shows numbers whizzing through the air, and he absorbed all the information, and it struck me as bullshit. There's also a show called CSI, and they have something similar where they'll have a freeze moment where they'll look at a little piece of evidence, and the camera will zoom in close on it and then it will get microscopic. And, of course, this is kind of how geniuses are portrayed in movies.

Todd: Being laser-focused and being able to lock on something and have it all makes sense instantly.

Joe: I wanted to discuss in today's episode how do we memorize little details, how do we detect and inspect little details, and how do we, as normal people who aren't trained for this, take these memory tricks, and apply them to our own life?

Todd: Now, having more attention to detail is going to what? Help me at work, help me in all my relationships…

Joe: Yes, you may not remember when your girlfriend's birthday is, but you are more likely to remember the details of what color she enjoys, etc.

Todd: So, what does a private investigator do?

Joe: I have no idea, but I hope it involves investigating other people's bookshelves.

_________________________________________________________________________

People seem to believe that CSI is real. In fact, there is something in law called the CSI effect where it's harder for people who are gathering evidence, professionals, to convince folks who have seen CSI that they are limited in what they can do. We imagine that intelligent people can zoom in on tiny things and that their mind works like the camera zooming in on the desk to find fibers on it. Or we have anecdotes in research about people who have perfect memory and perfect recall. We talked about Mike Ross from Suits once, a character who has a perfect memory. He can read a law book and, within seconds, snap his fingers and recall any fact he needs from that book. That is his superpower in that show.

We want to bust three myths about memory, recall, and little details on today's episode. And you may notice that I'm using memory and details almost interchangeably and talking about attention to detail and detecting things. But I keep mixing up memories with it, and there's a very good reason why. Little details and memory are very closely tied. It's not that you are less observant when you don't see the tiny fiber on the desk that CSI is zooming into; it is that you have seen it, but your memories decided not to write home about it.

Myth 1: That is not how memory works. You and I are not data computers, and nobody recalls lists of information without a monic device. But you do have one tool built into your brain that can write memory to your banks, and you have complete control over it. We're going to discuss that.

Joe: Which of our narratives in past episodes stuck in your memory the most?

Todd: The very first one on Lord Byron and toxic relationships. And then also toxic relationships with the crazy story on Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra. What about you?

Joe: Probably Anna Delvey. Classes of that narrative as well as the affluenza kid. Seeing this person kill people and yet not serve time because of his wealth. But there's a reason we aren't just a study podcast. We could very easily come in here and just list out a bunch of facts and figures.

Todd: Bullet points are boring. It turns into a boring lecture, and you tune it out and be turned off.

Joe: Right. It is so much more meaningful and memorable when we can put ourselves into these studies and can become involved. It's more impactful to pretend you are in those situations. That's one of the memory things we're going to talk about. You must be invested to learn something, and we'll get into the science of this very quickly.

If you want to remember something, only expect yourself to remember a fact per story. This is called episodic memory. Throughout the show, we will talk about different types of memory and how to use them to become Sherlock Holmes. So, our first type is episodic memory. Have you ever tried to recall very emotional things? Like, if I asked you to think about your first kiss, how vivid is that memory? Probably strong because you were emotionally tied to it. Getting fired from work, funerals, and breakups, these all have emotional ties. Episodic memory and emotionally charged memory are tied between the amygdala and the hippocampus.

For example, in police statements, people are faced with questions. Frequently they are emotionally charged, and it's easy to verbally prime them. If you ask how fast was the car going before the crash versus how fast the car was going, people will likely overestimate a crash by about 10 miles an hour. Memory is a very tricky thing, and the more emotionally charged you are, the more flexible and memorable it gets. The way episodic memory works is that the amygdala, which regulates emotions, helps write memories to the hippocampus.

There's a book called 'Unfuck Your Brain,' and it talks about how the amygdala is like a Richter Scale; it is using a motion to determine how bold of a line it writes to the hippocampus - how much it scratches those lines in those memories. If the Richter scale is high and you have a lot of emotions in a moment, your amygdala will be firing off high, but it's not necessarily going to pick up on the most important things. One of the things that people forget during a police interview is the gun. They'll forget what it looked like or what the model was. Or they will be so focused on the gun where they forget what the person looked like behind it. They'll not be able to recall the face.

Myth 2: There are all these memory hacks we see online. We see speed reading, perfect recall, and special forces training. So, what works and what's the real hack to memory?

Now, we want to talk about how to hijack that system. Now, remembering every little detail can hurt you in the long run. If we could remember each time our feelings got hurt, it would just start piling up into depression. Or, if you are Ross from Suits and you can remember everything you've ever read, how much junk would you have stored?

So, a man with an IQ of 100 points higher than Albert Einstein was miserable because he was so smart. If you can remember everything that you read or everything you see, you will hate your life. It is far better to hijack or use episodic memory. In short, if you are going through something and need to remember it, give it emotional weight. If it doesn't have emotional weight invented, make it up. There was a horn study that I was reading where they would play a horn sound after certain colors flashed on the screen. Whenever blue flashed on the screen, right after a boat/air horn would go off. These people in this test did not find it funny; it made them jump, and they were stressed. But it turns out if you mess with the amygdala, aka getting them scared and stressed, they remembered better and became less nervous about the horn. Overall, if you want to remember something, episodic memory is one of your best tools.

I found one study case of a person who had perfect memory. It was called autobiographical memory, and they could remember everything that ever happened to them. And you know what? They were extraordinarily miserable, and they hated their life. Their brain was broken because a healthy brain forgets, sleeps, and ejects memories that aren't going to be used again. Being able to remember everything is physically and mentally unhealthy and makes you hold grudges more.

Radio Lab did an episode called 9-volt Nirvana back, and it was about how people were taking nine-volt batteries, hooking them up to electrodes, and shocking parts of their heads. There was a journalist who tried the simulation as a sniper. There were too many things happening, and she failed. Then after taking the battery and shocking her in the temples, she went back to take the same course – and almost did it perfectly. She went from scoring 3 out of 20 to nearly a perfect score after the shock. I think of this like an Etch-a-Sketch. You have a cloud of neurons in your head, and to make one stick out to form a memory, you must highlight a circuit by using it. The more times we highlighted it, if it's an Etch-a-Sketch it’s iron filings, it brings those metal filings up. It raises them until you have a clear picture, and that circuit can be used. Every time you use it, it's easier to use. And when you sleep, it makes everything around it fade.

Your brain operates with the same electrical juice as a refrigerator bulb. So, when you are zapping it with a 9-volt battery, it became a sledgehammer in neurological terms. It is certainly not something that can be reliably repeated, but still very interesting to look into. We talked about how you'll build a memory of somebody who has hurt you or of someone who has done something outrageous. The more you access that memory with that emotional charge, the more you're going to embed it with those emotions. This is what we are advocating for. If you want to remember every little detail of something, give it an emotional charge. If I tell you that the bank robber took a pen, and that's the thing that you remember, then that is the thing that I would suggest clinging to and giving it an emotional charge.

Myth 3: Sherlock is an unfeeling dick, yet he can memorize everything. But that's not how memory works. Memory requires us to have strong feelings about boring stuff.

Have you ever listened to your college professor? A college professor cares about 1,500 opera or the price of tea in China during a Mongol invasion. So, we're going to talk about why memory requires strong emotion.

The last component of memory I want to talk about is memory that relies on arguments. There's a YouTuber who does a physics channel called Veritasium. He wrote his Ph.D. thesis on how arguments make it easier to remember facts. So, if you're ever trying to remember something difficult, it’s easier if you can transform it into an argument. When you hear an argument, you subconsciously start picking a side. They do this in sports as well.  

That's something they do in Game of Thrones too. There are so many world details to memorize in that series, yet you can easily pick up on them because you watch them have sex and have arguments that you end up picking sides on. Like, you could not get a better memory trick than that. You don't necessarily need to do that in your own life to memorize things, but it certainly helps If you're reading about something in history. Choose a side, and you'll remember the heck out of it. If you choose a side and or the “wrong side” just for fun, you will remember it better by building an argument for the opposite side and argue yourself back down. Lastly, we want to talk about spatial memory, photographic memory, and visual memory.

There is a TED Talk by Joshua Foer about how he won a memory master’s championship for fun. This guy is not a memory expert or born with a photographic memory. He just wanted to see if anyone could learn it. For listeners, the book is named Moonwalking with Einstein. He started to study and began to pick up little tricks and patterns. Then he entered the contest and won it. What this means is that if you work at it, you can strengthen your memory. For example, remembering names could be pairing their name up with something you are emotionally attached to in some way - put them in a bucket of people you already know who's close to you, and that can help you remember their names long-term.

Joe: If you don't think you already have a brilliant memory, just think back on whatever you did for work and what you had an argument about. You will remember so much more than anybody else who is outside of your field. So, you have these skills; you may just not have applied them to other places in your life.

Todd: A lot of Josh’s teachings are about making everything outrageous. The more outrageous and extreme, the more emotional you get it – hence the more likely you are to remember it.

Final Thoughts

In the world of little details, small things can lead to big results. It can also lead to small problems if you don't attend to them, like l death or other horrifying things. Did you know that most accidents happen near where you live? Everybody kind of knows that the reason why is because you get complacent. It's called inattention blindness. Your brain supplements what you should be looking at with what you remember. These are the things you have already seen - sunny days, the tree around the corner, and it is then coupled with an unexpected car where it shouldn't be.

If you want to take advantage of your ability to make memories, hijack the episodic system by putting yourself into a conflict involving the subject you're trying to learn about and the spatial system by putting yourself in the physical location. Use this to learn anything you want and be as dramatic as you want about it. It's okay if you completely fabricate things that are happening, as long as it's helping you memorize little boring details that otherwise wouldn't be interesting.

Joe: I accidentally got a PI license from the show and from my studies on story/ narratives, but I just want you to know that this isn't an irresponsible backward falling. I do not intend to sit in a hot car all day and take pictures of fraudulent medical claims or stalk cheating spouses. I intend to use this for lawyer assistance or as a researcher. I may even look into the Innocence Project, along with a couple of cold cases.

Again, I'm not going to claim to be anything I'm not.  I will purely do this as a researcher, but I want to say this is all thanks to doing the show with you, Todd - going through and realizing how interesting these things are, how interesting everyday life is when I pay enough attention and living in the now to absorb what's happening. Because if there is anything that this process has taught me, it’s that life is really awesome when you pay attention to it and when you get enough sleep to actually shake that Escabeche sketch back to normal.