“Our memories from the bedrock of who we are. Those recollections, in turn, are built on one very simple assumption: This happened. But things are not quite so simple. “We update our memories through the act of remembering,” says Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Davis, and the author of the illuminating new book “Why We Remember.” “So it creates all these weird biases and infiltrates our decision making. It affects our sense of who we are.” Rather than being photo-accurate repositories of past experience, Ranganath argues, our memories function more like active interpreters, working to help us navigate the present and future. The implication is that who we are, and the memories we draw on to determine that, are far less fixed than you might think. “Our identities,” Ranganath says, “are built on shifting sand.”
“We expect that we should be able to replay the past like a movie in our heads. The problem with that assumption is that we don’t replay the past as it happened; we do it through a lens of interpretation and imagination.”
“ Memory gives an illusion of stability in a world that is always changing. Because if we look for memories, we’ll reshape them into our beliefs of what’s happening right now. We’ll be biased in terms of how we sample the past. We have these illusions of stability, but we are always changing. And depending on what memories we draw upon, those life narratives can change.”
“On the more intentional side, are there things that we might be able to do in the moment to make events last in our memories? In some sense, it’s about being mindful. If we want to form a new memory, focus on aspects of the experience you want to take with you. If you’re with your kid, you’re at a park, focus on the parts of it that are great, not the parts that are kind of annoying. Then you want to focus on the sights, the sounds, the smells, because those will give you rich detail later on when you remember it. Another part of it, too, is that we kill ourselves by inducing distractions in our world. We have alerts on our phones. We check email habitually. So you don’t remember being there, because to some extent you were never really there in the first place. If you set time with your child, don’t check email, and turn off your alerts. That’s the idea. Technology can be helpful for memory, but usually not in the way we use it. You’re not really there if you’re mindlessly taking pictures, because it takes over the experience. When we go on trips, I take candid shots. These are the things that bring you back to moments. If you capture the feelings and the sights and the sounds that bring you to the moment, as opposed to the facts of what happened, that is a huge part of getting the best of memory.”
posted by f.sheikh