Part of an article, it is fascinating
How We Remember and Why We Forget. Or, Why Becoming the Man You Want to Be Is Not Like Riding a Bicycle
Scientists have identified two main types of long-term memory: declarative (explicit), and nondeclarative (implicit). Nondeclarative memories are memories of how to do something, and are often related to motor skills like running or driving a car. You can’t describe these kinds of memories in words, which is why they’re termed “nondeclarative.” Declarative memories, on the other hand, are memories of what, where, when, and why — facts, people, experiences, ideas, concepts, and the relationships between them. You can “declare” or describe these memories to others.
You don’t have to consciously recall nondeclarative memories from your brain – when you pick up a toothbrush, you know what to do with it without thinking it through. It’s instinctive. And you can retain that instinct pretty much indefinitely without effort – hence the old saying about something being “like riding a bicycle.”
Some men assume that becoming the man they want to be is like riding that proverbial bicycle. Once they have experiences that give them an understanding of their beliefs, who they want to be, and what they want out of life, they figure they won’t have any problem living out those insights – that they’ll simply set their course and sail straight for their goals. “Alright, I figured out what to do. Now I’ll do it.” One and done.
But the memories of our insights into who we want to be and what we want to do in life are in fact declarative memories; while aspects of your behavior can become habitual, acting in accordance with your values never becomes fully automatic, as it involves the constant making of conscious, sometimes very difficult, decisions.
Unlike nondeclarative memories, declarative memories must be consciously recalled from your brain. And it is in this recollection process that we encounter problems with forgetfulness.
Scientists believe that in general, once a long-term memory is consolidated in the cortex, it is there permanently. When we forget something, we may feel the memory has disappeared, but the problem is not existence but access. It’s there — we just can’t locate it.
When memories are encoded for long-term storage, the different aspects of that memory – everything from your physical location, mood, and level of motivation, to the smell, temperature, and ambient sounds present at the time — are broken up and stored in various locations in the brain. A neural network connects these disparate elements. When you recall a memory, a circuit fires through the network and reassembles those memory pieces into a whole. What this means is that any of these different pieces of memory can act like an entryway or cue that triggers the recall of the entire memory. For example, a memory of a childhood Christmas may have been broken up into the feeling of the fire in the fireplace, the smell of your mom’s cookies, the sound of Bing Crosby’s “Christmas Song,” the sight of lights twinkling on the tree, and the reading of A Night Before Christmas. Experiencing any one of these components separately later in life may cause this network of memories to light up and the whole memory of your childhood Christmas to come rushing back.
The more cues that were present when you first encoded the memory, that are present when you try to recall it later, the easy the memory is to retrieve. Think of the difference between simply imagining your old elementary school, and stepping foot back inside it – the latter will cause many more, and much more vivid, memories to come flooding back to you.
Similarly, scientists recommend that when studying for a test, students replicate the testing conditions they’ll experience on exam day as closely as possible. As they study, the cues in their environment will be encoded along with the information they are learning. When it’s time for the test, seeing the same cues again will help unlock the information the memory of those cues is tied to.
Conversely, in the absence of any of the cues that were present when a memory was encoded, a memory can sometimes be impossible to recall at a later time. It’s like looking for a library book without knowing its call number; it’s somewhere on the shelves but you don’t know where to look. This is called cue-dependent forgetting.
Cue Your Memories of the Man You Want to Be
What we learn from an understanding of cue-dependent forgetting, is that if we want to remember something, we often need to re-experience the same cues that were present when we first formed the memory.
For example, have you ever gotten up from the couch to get something in the kitchen, only to get there and realize you couldn’t remember what you came for? What often works to jog your memory is to retrace your steps, and cue-dependent recall is the reason this is effective. By sitting back down on the couch, the cues that were present when you first formed the memory of what you needed to get will trigger your recall of what it was.
And now at last we return to what it takes to hold fast to our beliefs and values and vision for our lives. We live in a world that prizes the exciting, the new, the original — and the idea of repetition sound pretty boring and unsexy. For the “one and done” folks, once you experience something, it’s on to the next thing. They say things like, “Why go to church every Sunday? The priest says the same things every week.” Or “I never read personal development books. I already know all that stuff already.”
But if you want to keep the important things you’ve learned at the forefront of your mind, where they can influence your decisions and keep you on track, you have to purposefully keep exposing yourself to the same cues that were around when you first learned those things.
So for example, while I sometimes don’t feel like going to church because, yes, we often do talk about the same things over and over, I find that when I do go, the sound of a familiar hymn or a phrase a speaker uses will activate a whole network of memories about my beliefs and how I want to live my life. And what I hear is of course never exactly the same as what I heard before, and I add these new twists into the neural network that mapped the old insight, expanding it. The result is that I leave feeling reinvigorated about how I want to live my life and refocused on what’s important to me. My grip on the rope of my faith, which had loosened during the week, tightens.
Similarly, while it’s true that most personal development articles or books say the same things I already know and have been said for thousands of years, I find that even when they don’t say anything earthshaking, reading them reactivates a network of insights I’ve gotten in the past (“Oh yeah! I remember that concept. I hadn’t thought about that in awhile.”), renewing my motivation to tackle my personal goals. And again, I add some slightly new angles to my old ideas. My grip on the rope of my personal development tightens.
Cue-dependent remembering works for many other important areas of our lives too. If you’re feeling burned out at work, it may be that with advancements in your position and changes in your responsibilities, you feel cut off from the things that used to make you love your job. Revisiting those old people/places/tasks, can help you remember why you decided on this career in the first place.
If your love for your wife has faded from the heady times when you first fell for each other, revisiting the kinds of things you used to do together back then can provide the missing cues that will dislodge those old feelings of love and affection.
Finally, there’s a bonus to using cues to rejog your memories. Every time you actively recall a memory, it strengthens its pathway in your brain, making it even easier to retrieve next time.
Conclusion
People often ask, “Whatever happened to common sense?” Part of the answer to that question is that cues, basically reminders, on how to conduct your life in an honorable way, used to be built into the fabric of the culture. Moral messages were included in school curriculums, and in popular songs, movies, and books. And teachers, parents, and neighbors were happy to offer reminders on being a good person if you were getting off track. Thus, it was hard to go very long without a cue triggering a memory of how you were supposed to act.
These days, cues on living a virtuous life are virtually absent from school or popular culture. And there are thousands of other stimuli vying for your attention. What this means is that you can’t hope to accidentally bump into cues every day that will help you remember the things that are most important to you. Instead, you have to purposefully plan for your regular exposure to those cues. You do this by regularly reading your scriptures, or personal manifesto, or books on philosophy and development, and doing other things which continually pull up all your past feelings and insights into the man you want to be, bringing them to bear on your present challenges.
The longer you go between getting those reminders, the more forgetfulness sets in, and the looser your grip on the rope of your values, beliefs, and goals gets. And once you lose hold of the rope, the harder it is to find again – the easiest way to stay on track is to never get too far from it. On the path to becoming the man you want to be, you have to hold fast to the rope that leads the way, no matter how rocky the journey becomes. Remember, remember.
http://artofmanliness.com/2012/10/08/hold-fast-how-forgetfulness-torpedos-your-journey-to-becoming-the-man-you-want-to-be-and-remembrance-is-the-antidote/
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