Transcriber: raghad afaneh Reviewer: Taher Koja
What I'd like to begin by doing is asking you about your earliest memory.
Let’s think about your earliest memory and what features of that memory
can you remember? How old were you when that event occurred?
And I’m going to let you think about that now because we’ll come back to it later on
So what makes us human in psychological terms ? Is it intelligence?
Is that personality? Is it consciousness or language?
Well, in my many years studying psychology
and I've covered most of these subjects in my time,
I've come to the conclusion that what really sets us apart
as human beings in terms of our psychology is memory.
And obviously, memory is intertwined with these other human abilities.
So memory, language work together.
That’s something I’m going to be mentioning later on.
So people love talking about their memories. Life is about memory.
So in this talk, what I want to do is to illustrate some of the ways
in which memory can benefit us, as well as sometimes letting us down.
But the message is positive memory slips.
Memory gaps are a necessary part of us functioning well as human beings.
Well, there are obvious reasons we can think about why memory is important.
We need to remember how to get from A to B, remembering people’s names,
how to drive a car.
Think about the various relationships you have in your life.
You are a mother or daughter or sister,
brother, nephew, friend or enemy, even.
And think about the ways in which you deal
with all of these different people.
I bet you your you behave very differently when you're with your mom
than when you're with your friend or when you're with your enemy.
And how do we know how to be appropriate in these different relationships?
It's because we have memory,
so memory guides us in these kinds of social relationships,
and it has an element to it that is really fundamental to what it
is to be human.
So, OK, that's one thing relationships,
and we don’t know how to deal with other people,
but without a memory, more importantly,
perhaps we don’t know who we are without a memory
we have no sense of history. So we have no sense of the past.
Without that, we cannot plan in the present
and without that also we cannot plan for the future.
So without a memory, we have no past, no present and no future.
And one of the reasons that we know, excuse me.
And one of the reasons that we know that this is the case
is from studies of amnesic patients.
And people with certain types of amnesia have a real problem
if you ask them to plan for the future.
So if I ask any of you in this room, what will you be doing this time next week?
What will you be doing this time next year?
You might not have a clear plan, but you’ll be able to see, Well,
I’ll probably be doing this or I would like to be doing that.
So we know from amnesiac patients that memory is essential
not just for the history bet but for the future bet as well.
So I want to talk a bit about memory gaps when memory goes wrong.
So memory gaps can be annoying, embarrassing and downright dangerous.
So forgetting where you put your keys and forgetting somebody's name,
forgetting that you turn the gas off when you left the house this morning.
Making mistakes about someone you see in a shop or an encounter on the street.
And you cannot for the life of you,
remember the context for where you know that person.
I want to just ask and I'm not going to ask for the lights up,
but I'm guessing what the answer is.
Has anybody in this room had
the experience of going upstairs to fetch something?
And then when you get to the top of the stairs,
you don’t remember what you went for.
[laughing]
OK, that speaks for itself, doesn’t it?
It would be easier to ask has anybody not had the experience of going up
the stairs and not remembering what you went for?
So we've all had it, and it's interesting because sometimes when
I talk to groups of older adults,
this is one of the things we call it absent mindedness.
And it's one of the things that older people are really concerned about,
and it’s important for me to let them know
that this is a problem that everybody has.
So how do you go about retrieving the memory then if you get to the top
of the stairs and you don’t remember? Well, certainly what I do.
I go back down the stairs, I go to the place I was,
when I originally had the thought, and more often than not,
it comes back to me. Oh yes, I went up the stairs to fetch my glasses.
And what this tells us is that context is really important in memory.
Having that contextual information about where you were when
the thought originally occurred to you,
how about the embarrassment of being introduced to someone?
And then the next time you meet them, they greet you warmly,
they shake your hand and they say, Hey, Katrina, it's great to see you again.
And you know their face, but you cannot for the life of you,
put a name to that face and that, you know,
so that’s a really embarrassing situation.
Now, this is about deep processing.
So what we're not doing here is processing their information,
their name information, deeply enough in the first place.
So how do you get around that?
You focus on the face, you shake them by the hand and look them in the eye.
And when they say, my name is Andy, you say, Hey Andy,
it's great to meet you and write, I'm processing that information.
I might even associate that name information with another Andy that
I know. OK, so I’ve got some kind of anchor to that name and to that face.
And one of Bill Clinton’s key characteristics
as a charismatic politician was that he never forgot somebodies name.
And people thought this was just that he was the bee's knees.
He thought so much of him.
He thought so much of them, and then consequently,
they thought so much of him. So they thought, Bill Clinton knows my name.
so, you know, you can get along way by doing these little memory tricks.
And it really enhances your chances and relationships.
So it’s about consciously making an effort to process the information.
Let’s think about cues for memory,
I’m one of the things I’m interested in is thinking of slightly unconventional
cues for memory. So what about
if you experienced to just know the smell
of the perfume that your mother wore when you were a child?
Let's say that wafts through the room. What's that going to do for you?
Well, I predict it's going to get some long forgotten memories back.
It's going to have the experience of transporting you.
If that smell is a memory that means enough to you.
Then you will feel transported and it will unlock
a theme of memories that might otherwise not be easily retrievable.
And similarly, what about the effect of music on memory
and retrieving memories?
So a song that might mean a lot to you that you haven’t heard for many years?
If you hear that song now, you again might find this
you get this sense of being transported.
So we're really interested in my lab and other labs and looking at these cues
and thinking about how can we use slightly
alternative cues fully to appreciate the extent of human memory?
Well, I want to talk about now is a super memory.
So memory slips can be annoying, embarrassing, dangerous.
But would you want to remember everything for sure?
At first, that this seems attractive, and for some people,
very few they do have genuine super memories. Now this might be useful.
For example, if you witness a crime
and you are called to give evidence in court and the judge asks you,
let's say it's a knife crime, you witness somebody being attacked with a knife.
You’ll be asked questions like What was the perpetrator wearing?
The guy holding the knife? What was the victim wearing?
What was the weather like?
Now what we know about witnessing crime being
an eye witness is that people experience something that we call weapon focus.
And what happens here is that in a traumatic situation,
you're focusing on the weapon.
So the stuff around the edges
gets very blurred.
So you might not remember what somebody was wearing,
because your whole attention is on the knife.
So despite the fact that you are telling the absolute truth
because your memory is a bit patchy, a bit sketchy,
you don't have that much information,
you're you may be regarded as being less reliable.
So, OK, there’s a situation in which, yeah,
it'd be brilliant to have a super memory.
But might it not be really annoying to have a super memory?
So why do we need to remember what we had for lunch on Thursday,
three weeks ago? And there's actually a case of one woman who has
a super memory who calls this kind of memory a curse.
She says it plays over and over in my mind.
We don't need that level of of memory.
So that’s why, you know, not remembering everything is not necessarily a bad thing.
I want to mention the case of a science journalist called
Joshua Foer, and he was a journalist,
but he was nothing special in terms of his memory abilities.
but Joshua decided he was he was really interested in memory,
and he saw evidence of these world memory champions and he thought,
I want to be one of these.
And ultimately he did get to be a memory champion in the UFC,
and what he said about it was that anyone can do this.
So if you use the right skills, if you use the right techniques,
then any of us could win the world memory champions.
And one of the techniques he used was something called memory palaces.
So let me explain Memory Palace to you.
Let’s say you want to remember a list of random objects when you read them eight
because I'm not very good, my own memories is not very good,
which is why I study it. Let's see. Give you a few few objects.
Cabbage book train armadillo pen
monkey telescope dog key.
And we’ll come back to that in five minutes
and see how many of these objects you remember. They're not related in any way.
So how are you going to do it right? I suggest you use a memory palace.
And what this is is thinking about a place or
a route that is familiar to you.
And and I'm thinking about placing the objects along that route.
So let's say you're standing at your front door.
So somewhere that’s nice and familiar. Visualize it.
So memory palaces are very much about visualization.
Visualize the front door and then notice that there's a cabbage on your doorstep.
Then you come into the hall and there's a book in your way on the floor.
And as you go in the kitchen,
there's a train on the kitchen table and that's how you hang your coat up.
Long behold, there’s an armadillo at the coat stand. So you get the picture.
I know it sounds a bit silly, but try it, try it. And you know, it's remarkable.
And Joshua Foer used it as one of his techniques to win
the UFC memory championships.
OK, so, memory palaces, I you know, I think they’re really neat little tool.
The other thing that I would see is so often I get asked as a memory expert,
Hey, do I remember where I put my keys? It's not rocket science routine.
Always put your keys in the same place.
Sometimes people are disappointed when I give them that answer
because they're like, Is that it? And the answer is yes. Is it OK?
So back to your earliest memories and now I'm going to need
the lights up, please.
Because what I want to ask you, was nice to see everybody.
What I want to ask you is to think about
the age you were when you had your earliest memory.
OK, so what we're seeing there is
a very reliable kind of picture that we get every time we ask people about
their early memories. And it seems that most people don’t have memories much from
below the age of two or three. So why is this? Well, I think it's about language.
It's I think it's no coincidence that it's now I'm not to say that.
It’s not to say that your earlier, memories are not real,
but that's a separate conversation.
But it's all right in the age of three that children are developing language
skills where they start to be able to tell stories about their lives.
So I think it's this kind of storytelling that helps lay down the memories properly
so that they become lifelong memories. So how accurate are these memories?
Well, and that's a question I'm often asked, how accurate are they?
We can’t go back in time and we don’t really know.
But there’s an extent to which a lot of the time it doesn’t really matter
whether your memories are true or not.
It matters that they're important and useful for your life story.
So we can get but just in summarizing,
we can get bogged down by worrying about memory gaps that can be really
frustrating, and sometimes they can be dangerous.
But let’s think about the positives about memory.
Memory gives us a history, even if it's not that accurate,
and that's the most important thing about it. It helps us to plan our future.
Second, there are strategies we can use.
We can try memory palaces, deep processing routine.
There are ways that we can expand our memories,
and I believe that the limits of human memory are much bigger
than we think they are if we make the effort.
And third, as far as human memory is concerned,
the glass is certainly half full and
there’s lots more capacity there.
If we think about music and smell
and all these cues that we could use to enhance our memory,
there's a lot more in the air than is easily retrievable.
And it’s about finding those cues. So I’ll finish
then with a I’m going to paraphrase a quote from Salman Rushdie.
He writes very eloquently about memory and about the subjectivity of memory.
And he sees memory is not reality.
But your memory, your own personal memory is truer than anybody else's.
Thank you very much.