The Art of Making Memories

by Meik Wiking

  I remember the black grapes. I remember they had to be squeezed and the juice removed from the zest quickly so the wine would not take on the color. You could hold a cup under the press and drink the freshly squeezed juice. The best part of the day was returning from the fields, tired, dirty and hungry. In the evenings, we would have a rustic dinner. I remember there was a fridge stacked with only champagne. I remember ending the day with a perfect deep sleep on a thin mattress on a concrete floor. I remember being very happy.

  I remember the smells, the sounds, the sights, the tastes and the physical sensations of my twenty-first year. I remember conversations, what I was thinking about, the price of a coffee, the names of dogs, the menus. I remember being twenty-one.

  When I was thirty-one, I remember going to the office a lot.

  In fact, the only exchange of words I remember from that year is a short conversation I had with Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This was the year of the climate summit in Copenhagen. The company I was working for was organizing an event at Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, north of Copenhagen, also known as Hamlet’s Castle.

  Meik Wiking

  “Do you know where the bathroom is?” Dr. Pachauri asked me.

  “I’ll show you. It’s in the courtyard. There’s only one toilet in the entire castle.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Only one toilet in the entire castle—really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think maybe Hamlet was misquoted?”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe he said, ‘To pee—or not to pee—that is the question.’”

  That’s it. That is pretty much all I remember from that year. Granted, it was witty—but is it really “life flashing before my eyes” material? There must have been more meaningful moments to hold onto and to make into memories than pee puns. Nevertheless, that is what remains.

  That is the tyranny of the reminiscence bump.

  What about you? What do you remember about being twenty-one? Or from another year? And how do your memories from different decades compare?

  One theory behind the reminiscence bump is that our teens and early adulthood years are our defining years, our formative years. Our identity and sense of self is developing at that time and some studies suggest that experiences that are linked to who we see ourselves as are more frequently retold in explaining who we are and are therefore remembered better later in life.

  Another theory is that the period involves a lot of firsts. Our first kiss, our first flat, our first job. As you might recall, the Happy Memory Study we conducted at the Happiness Research Institute found that 23 percent of people’s memories were of novel or extraordinary experiences.

  Novelty ensures durability when it comes to memory. Several studies show that we are better at remembering the novel and the new, the extraordinary days when we did something different. One study by British researchers Gillian Cohen and Dorothy Faulkner found that 73 percent of vivid memories were either first-time experiences or unique events. Extraordinary and novel experiences are subject to greater elaborative cognitive processing, which leads to better encoding of these memories. That is the power of firsts. Extraordinary days are memorable days.

  HAPPY MEMORY TIP:

  ONCE A YEAR, GO SOMEPLACE YOU’VE NEVER BEEN BEFORE

  Make plans to visit new places—be it an exotic destination or the park across town.

  I love going back to places I’ve been to before. Every summer, I go to Bornholm, a small island in the Baltic Sea. I have a small place there. I enjoy knowing where the wild cherries grow and where to go spearfishing for flounders. But recently I have come to appreciate the importance of going somewhere I have not been before, to make new memories. To make the pace of time slow down when I look back ten years from now. And going someplace new doesn’t always have to mean northwest Mongolia or Ouagadougou. It can also mean that park at the other end of town.

  Last year I went to the white cliff of Møn. The gigantic white cliff rises over 100 metres high above the Baltic Sea and offers some of Denmark’s most dramatic scenery. (In all fairness, the competition is not fierce in this pancake-flat country. The tallest point in Denmark is 171 metres.) The cliff is also one of the best places in Denmark to go fossil hunting. Often, fossils over 70 million years old—give or take a few years—are found there, and recently a young boy found a dinosaur tooth from a mosasaur, the T. Rex of the ocean. It takes only an hour and forty minutes to drive there from where I live in Copenhagen—yet I had never gone before. I spent the afternoon looking for fossils and humming the theme tune from the Indiana Jones movies. I didn’t find any fossils but I came home with another memory for the treasure trove.

  Where will you go? We all have places we’ve been thinking about visiting but have never got around to it. So where have you never been before? It might be somewhere far away, or somewhere nearby. Get out the calendar. Get out the maps.

  Meik Wiking

  Source: David B. Pillemer et al., ‘Very Long-Term Memories of the First Year in College’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 1988.

  The importance of first experiences also means that, say, if you go to university, you are more likely to remember events from the beginning of your first year than later in that same year. In a study led by David Pillemer, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire, participants were asked to describe memories from their freshman year in college. “We are not interested in any particular type of experience,” said the researchers, “just describe the first memories that come to mind.”

  Researchers interviewed 182 women who had graduated two, twelve or twenty-two years ago from Wellesley College. In the second part of the study, participants were asked to analyze, one by one, each of the memories they had described earlier. The memories were rated on the intensity of the emotions the experience involved, the impact the event had had on their life both at the time of the memory and also in retrospect, and the estimated date of the experience they remembered.

  The study showed that, for participants in all the university intake years, the majority of memories took place at the beginning of the academic year: around 40percent in the month of September and around 16 percent in October.

  These results suggest that transitional and—as we shall see later—emotional experiences are especially likely to persist in the memory for many years. That is the power of firsts.

  In the Happy Memory Study we conducted at the Happiness Research Institute, we also found evidence of the power of extraordinary days and novel experiences when it comes to happy memories.

  More than 5 percent of all the happy memories we collected are explicitly about firsts. First dates, first kisses, first steps—or traveling alone to Italy at the age of sixty for the first time. The first job, the first dance performance or the first time you watched a movie in the cinema with your dad.

  That is why I remember every first kiss I’ve ever had—including the very first. Her name was Kristy and I was sixteen and scared of her dad, who was a professional rugby player.

  Marcel ter Bekke/Getty Images

  HAPPY MEMORY TIP:

  CHASE MANGOES

  New and memorable experiences also come in the form of food. Make sure you take your taste buds on trips, too.

  I was sixteen when I first tasted a mango. It was in 1994, I was an exchange student in Australia, and mangoes had not yet been introduced to supermarkets in Denmark, where I grew up.

  I remember the sweetness, the texture. I remember thinking, Where have you been all my life? Since then, I have been chasing mangoes—believing that there are still great food experiences out there which I have not yet had. I have tried fermented Icelandic shark, and snails in a street market in Morocco. Both made me throw up a little, but I remember those moments quite vividly. My point is that firsts need not come in the form of geography but can also be in the shape of gastronomy. If you want to create a night to rem
ember for your dinner guests, then serving them something they have not tasted before might do the trick (but maybe not fermented shark, if you want them to come again).

  Ideally, it would be something that is not over and done with in a second, like a shot of licorice vodka at three in the morning. Nobody remembers that—for several reasons. Better to go with something like an artichoke, which takes a bit of an effort to eat, as you have to peel each leaf off, dip it in salted butter then use your teeth to harvest that wonderful flesh. This makes the whole experience longer lasting and multisensory.

  It might also be the reason why life seems to speed up as we get older. When we’re in our teens, there are a lot of firsts, while firsts at fifty are rarer. The landscape of our youth may also change more rapidly. Compare Hanoi, Paris, Champagne or Baeza to a mash of days at the office.

  This is also why studies find that people who immigrated from a Spanish-speaking country to the US have their reminiscence bump at different times, depending on how old they were at the time of the move.

  Moving to another city is a personal temporal landmark, but landmarks also come in the form of universal or collective landmarks—like the Kennedy assassination, or 9/11.

  In all circumstances, these temporal landmarks of firsts and changes of scene play an important role in organizing autobiographical memory. There is a before and an after.

  If we want life to slow down, to make moments memorable and our lives unforgettable, we may want to remember to harness the power of firsts. In our daily routines, it’s also an idea to consider how we can turn the ordinary into something more extraordinary in order to stretch the river of time. It may be little things. If you always eat in front of the television, it might make the day feel a little more extraordinary if you gather for a family dinner around a candlelit table—and if you are always eating candlelit dinners, it might be nice to eat dinner during a movie marathon.

  THE HUMMINGBIRD

  A couple of years ago, I spent the summer in Guadalajara, Mexico. I was finishing a book—and could work from anywhere—and there might have been a woman in the equation as well.

  One afternoon, I was waiting outside a barbershop and, suddenly, a hummingbird appeared. It kept me company for a minute or two, hovering, flaunting its skills as the helicopter of the animal kingdom. That’s amazing. I have never seen a hummingbird before, I thought.

  A year later, my father, my brother and I were reminiscing about a trip we made to the States when I was twelve. Four weeks. Four states. Four different cars. We talked about New York, about the Grand Canyon, about the Kennedy Space Center and about crossing the Rio Grande from Texas to Mexico.

  “Do you remember the hummingbirds?” my father asked.

  “What?”

  “The hummingbirds we saw in Utah?”

  It turned out that the hummingbird I saw in Mexico was not the first. I had seen them many years before. The fact that I was twelve at the time might explain it. At that age, hummingbirds do not seem special. They are birds. And birds are not cool. You know what is cool? No, it’s not a billion dollars—it is cherry Coke and MTV. Those are the special things my twelve-year-old brain stored.

  Or, as Friedrich Nietzsche is supposed to have said, “The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.”

  What may be ordinary and forgettable to you might be extraordinary and memorable to me. So, different people may remember different things about the same event. As a small exercise, try going for a walk with a friend or family member and compare afterwards what you noticed during it. If you have kids, you may also want to remind them of the extraordinary experiences you have shared together—they might not have realized at the time quite how remarkable they were.

  Daniel Ripplinger/DansPhotoArt/Getty Images

  Whale, horse, cat, eagle, cow, turkey, cheesecake, elephant

  We remember the extraordinary things, the things that stick out. This is known as the isolation or von Restorff effect, after the German psychiatrist Hedwig von Restorff, who, in 1933, found that when participants are showed a list of words in which one word is very different from the others, that word is better remembered. For instance, in the list of words above, the word “cheesecake” will be the one you remember. And dropping the von Restorff effect into conversation also makes you sound smart at dinner parties.

  HAPPY MEMORY TIP:

  IF YOU ARE GIVING A TALK, TAKE A PINEAPPLE ON STAGE WITH YOU

  If you want people to remember you, you need to give them something to remember you by.

  About ten years ago, I got a scratch on my cornea from a dance-related accident which meant I had to wear an eyepatch for a week. Best. Week. Ever. At the time, I was working for a think tank called Monday Morning on sustainability. The eyepatch not only gave everyone carte blanche to make endless pirate jokes and allowed me to control every meeting I went to (Nobody disagrees with the patch!), it also made me less forgettable. Meik from Monday Morning? Is that the guy . . . ? Yes, that’s the guy with the eyepatch.

  Maybe we all want to be remembered, to be thought about when we are gone. In The Iliad, Achilles considers the choice between a long and peaceful life and a short life that will bring him everlasting glory.

  Either, if I stay here and fight beside the city of Trojans, my return home is gone, but my glory shall be everlasting; but if I return home to the beloved land of my fathers, the excellence of my glory is gone, but there will be a long life left for me, and my end in death will not come to me quickly.

  Granted, we still read and talk about Achilles today, but maybe there is an easier way to be remembered than whooping ass at the gates of Troy.

  So, if you want to be unforgettable, dare to be odd, to stand out. For instance, if I am doing a presentation at a conference, often I stand out easily because people remember “that happiness guy”—but what if I were just one out of twenty happiness researchers? The answer is: bring a pineapple with you on stage. When the conference is over the audience will remember the guy with the pineapple. Of course, you have to inform people why you brought it on stage; otherwise, it would just seem weird. Or weirder than you are going for. There’s a fine line between good weird and never-being-invited-back weird. Bringing a pineapple to a meeting at the Prime Minister’s office falls into the second category. By the way, good luck with trying to eat a pineapple again without remembering this point.

  Chapter II

  Make It Multisensory

  arjma/Shutterstock

  “Her name was Modesta, but she really wasn’t,” Lola said. Lola is my Spanish editor, and we were having a fish and squid lunch at the San Miguel market, just behind Plaza Mayor in Madrid.

  Modesta means “modest” in Spanish; she was Lola’s grandmother and she was one of those characters who would fit perfectly into a novel by Isabel Allende or a movie by Pedro Almodóvar. Whenever I think of her I imagine her with a proud stoic poise and a glance that could bring a horse carriage to an instant halt.

  “If you go to university, you’ll never be married,” Modesta’s father had warned her. This was Spain in the twenties and going to university was strictly for men. Furthermore, her father, despite being a doctor, believed that Modesta’s sister had died because of the effect education could have on a woman’s brain.

  Nevertheless, Modesta persisted and did go to university. Her aunt would chaperone her, sitting at the back of the class knitting, watching Modesta and watching the boys. How’s that for a scene, Almodóvar?

  After school, Modesta and her aunt would go to La Mallorquina, a bakery on the Plaza del Sol established in 1894, and have small cakes known as estrellas de hojaldre.

  Modesta graduated with three degrees, two in teaching and one in pharmaceuticals. Oh, and she did get married, and she survived the Spanish Civil War and lived to ninety-seven. In her later years she frequently asked Lola to bring her one of the estrellas from La Mallorquina.

  La Mallorquina still exists today. A
few months after learning Modesta’s story, I was back in Madrid and went to the Plaza del Sol to find it. It is located right on the corner of Calle Mayor, opposite a KFC and a McDonald’s. Unfortunately, they stopped making the estrellas de hojaldre a few years ago. “It was a very simple cake,” the baker told me. “We have better cakes today.”

  But that wasn’t the point, not for me. I was curious to taste what Modesta had tasted almost a century earlier, to experience a taste of her memory. Nor, I suppose, was the actual taste the point for Modesta. Sometimes, it isn’t what the taste is like but what that taste reminds us of that is the attraction. Maybe what Modesta tasted was her youth. Maybe the taste was her aunt’s knitting needles weaved into the professor’s words on the laws of chemistry. Maybe it was a taste of freedom.

  And Modesta is not alone in using taste as a memory trigger. In the Happy Memory Study we conducted at the Happiness Research Institute, people frequently mentioned the taste or smell of food. In fact, 62 percent of the memories we collected were multisensory.

  * * *

  Happy memories are . . .

  “Walking down the main street in the town I grew up in with my mom while eating a lemon Italian ice cream.”

  “My mom roasting poblano peppers on the stove when I was a child. I loved the smell of it as the peppers’ skin crackled and popped as they roasted in the flames.”