The Art of Making Memories

by Meik Wiking

  Later that day, the discussion over lunch is the news that the American origami champion has been found guilty of doping. His thumb and index finger have been injected with a small bit of metal, enabling him to make sharper folds.

  “Happy birthday,” say the friends you meet after work. “Thanks, guys,” you say, unwrapping their present to you. It’s a book, a memoir: Unfolded by Takahashi.

  In short, I don’t care about soccer. Sorry, I just needed to get that out of the way. Because my favorite study in 2018 was in fact about soccer. “Is Soccer a Matter of Life and Death—or is It More Important than That?” by Peter Dolton and George MacKerron, published by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research.

  The study examines how the results of soccer matches affect the happiness of the fans and used data taken from 3 million responses by 32,000 people from the Mappiness App, a research project at the London School of Economics. Its aim was to understand how people’s feelings are affected by their environment. The participants in the study are “pinged” via their smartphones and asked to complete a short survey containing questions about their well-being in that given moment: how happy, how relaxed and how awake they feel. They are asked who they are with, where they are and what they are doing. In the question about what they are doing, they can choose between forty options, including attending a sporting event. GPS data is also collected via their smartphones, so the researchers can use the assumption that, if you are at Old Trafford every time Manchester United plays a home game (and registered that you are outside, at a sporting event, and not working), you are likely to be a Manchester United fan and therefore see how your team winning or losing affects your happiness levels. Armed with this data, the researchers can combine it with when different teams are playing, the results of the match and expected results by using the bookmakers’ odds for any given match.

  The study finds that the marginal effect on happiness in the hour after the game for a win, draw or loss for your team are, respectively, 2.4, –3.2 and –7.2, if you were not at the stadium. If you were at the stadium, winning will give you a plus on happiness of 9.8, a draw will set you back –3, and a loss will be felt more heavily, with a rating of –14.

  This supports something called the loss-aversion affect—the notion that we hate losing much more than we enjoy winning. The study also finds what we would anticipate—that if we expected to lose (based on the odds at the bookmakers’) then won, the victory will be even sweeter. Similarly, fans were even more unhappy if their team lost when a win was expected.

  Of course, there is also the enjoyment (for some people) of the match itself and the enjoyment of looking forward to the event. There is a large spike in happiness before the match. However, overall, the findings demonstrate that “people are much more negatively affected by the adverse results of match defeats than they are positively affected when their teams win. This effect lasts much longer and may add up to around four times the negative impact on happiness for a defeat as compared to the positive effect of a win.”

  In short, soccer fans are irrational. From a happiness point of view, being a fan of soccer is a bad idea. The accumulated effect of following soccer is negative. Nevertheless, it can provide a source of happy memories. Here is an American soccer mum who took part in our Happy Memory Study: “I watched my daughter score her first goal in soccer for her high school team. It was the first goal of the season in the first game and the first time her high school had scored against the other school in five years.”

  Stephanie Reid/EyeEm/Getty Images

  PEAK—END WEEKEND

  So, which day of the week offers the best chance of happy memories? Which days are our happiest and least happy? Seems like a really simple question—however, the answer is not so simple.

  The Mappiness Study also collected data from 22,000 people over a two-month period to explore the effect the day of the week had on happiness, and exonerated Mondays. Tuesdays are the worst day. One theory by the researchers is that, on Mondays, the weekend effect still lingers, but on Tuesday it is gone and next weekend is still way off in the distance.

  However, another study, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology by two researchers from the University of Sydney, found that mood was lowest on Mondays. A third study found no variation across the weekdays. So the jury is still out on the Blue Monday effect.

  However, the weekend effect is detected across the various studies. For many, it is the highlight of the week. People report high levels of happiness on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Some studies show a dip on the Sunday, as people realize the weekend is about to end.

  The reasons why people experience higher levels of happiness at the weekend include greater autonomy, more relaxation and more connection with others. During the week, there are more things that are beyond our control and we face constraints on our time, with meetings, managers and deadlines. We are forced to spend time with people we do not necessarily connect with. At the weekend, we can, to a greater extent, choose activities that bring us joy and spend time with the ones we love the most. Many of us, of course, have to work at weekends, and people who do not fit into the classic nine-to-five schedule would of course report different results.

  In conclusion, on average, people are happier during weekends. Thank you, big data, for that nugget of wisdom. However, taking Kahneman’s peak–end theory into account, this might work in our favor. If we end the week on a high note, we may look back on that week more fondly.

  CHORE WARS—WHY MEMORY MAKES US FIGHT

  In 2010, a survey conducted by Cozi, a company offering family organizers online, asked 700 men and women with children about their share of various household chores, for example, grocery shopping, gift shopping, household financing, scheduling and planning.

  Basically, it was a comparison of how hard Mum and Dad work in the home—or at least how hard they think they work.

  For instance, men claimed they did 55 percent of the planning and scheduling. However, women claimed they did 91 percent. That adds up to 146 percent. And the same goes for every chore on the list. The combined share of what men and women claimed they did of each chore exceeded 100 percent.

  So what is going on here? Well, in social science, we often run into what is called the social-desirability bias. People over-report good behavior because we have a desire to be seen favorably by others. “How often do I donate money to charity?” you ask. “Well, all the time. In fact, here’s some money. Take it. Please like me.” Even if the survey is online and anonymous, we cannot rule out the social-desirability effect. We like to tell ourselves stories about how good we are.

  But another factor may also be at play: our memory. Take grocery shopping, where both men and women claim that they do the majority of the work. Men claim they do 46 percent and women claim they do 77 percent. A total of 123 percent.

  What happens may be that the memory of when we did the chore simply sticks better. When I do the grocery shopping, I experience searching for artichokes (I had to go to three places to get them), I experience picking the wrong queue at the checkout (Come on, you have to weigh the apples and put the price sticker on?!), I experience carrying the heavy bags home (Why did I pack all the heavy stuff in just one of the bags?).

  When you do the grocery shopping, my experience is: “Yum. Artichokes! Oh, good, we got milk.” It is a less vivid memory. When I first read about this study, I felt like phoning a couple of ex-girlfriends.

  Chapter VII

  Use Stories to Stay Ahead of the Forgetting Curve

  Kovtun Anastasiia/Shutterstock

  “I went to a freezing, windy, wild beach this summer with my husband and children,” writes one of the participants in the Happy Memory Study we conducted at the Happiness Research Institute, a woman from the UK in her thirties.

  “We were determined to have porridge and oatcakes cooked on a fire pit for breakfast, only for us to end up eating cold, raw porridge and rubbery oatcakes flavored with mou
ntains of sand. Lots of laughter and unrivaled family time.” When asked why she thinks she still remembers the event today, she replied, “Because, despite everything that was going wrong, it was one of the funniest experiences of my life, and one that I shared with my family. No phones, no TV, just the four of us, all wrapped up in big blankets, watching wild waves crashing, huddled around the fire pit, eating horrendous food and being covered in a layer of sand.”

  I love this story. If we don’t do anything stupid, if things don’t go wrong, we don’t have any stories to tell. I’m sure that story is going to be one of the classics in that family. It is our common stories that bind us together. Thirty-six percent of the memories we collected in the Happy Memory Study were remembered by the participants because the memories have been turned into anecdotes and stories.

  In addition, our well-being is influenced by our ability to form a favorable narrative of our lives. Do we ruminate over failures and mistakes, or are we able to find the silver lining in our struggles? What aspects we focus on when we tell the story of our life, the story of how we became who we are, has an impact on our sense of self.

  One study by Dan McAdams, professor of psychology at Northwestern University in Illinois, shows that an ability to construct stories of personal redemption is associated with higher levels of mental health and well-being. A redemption story is a situation that starts bad and ends better, for example, cold porridge: bad; laughing with the family: better.

  Because of ripped Santa—the retrieval of a memory strengthens the memory—it means that the way we shape the stories of what happened shape the way we remember those events. Our stories are our attempt to make sense of the world. Telling a story of an experience means rehearsal, it means strengthening the connection between some pieces of information in our brain, making the memory more memorable. Or, in the words of Muriel Rukeyser, the American poet and political activist, in The Speed of Darkness: “The universe is made up of stories. Not atoms.”

  HAPPY MEMORY TIP:

  COLLECT OBJECTS THAT ARE A MANIFESTATION OF YOUR STORIES

  Make sure your things tell your stories.

  When I look around my home office, I see paintings, photographs and objects. One painting is of the farm where my grandfather grew up. There was only an outside toilet and, one afternoon, as my grandfather was in there doing his business, he heard Dr. Brenner’s car. Dr. Brenner was the first in the town to acquire a car so, at the roar of the engine, my grandfather knew it was him. Wanting to see the car, my grandfather climbed up to look through the window, but slipped and fell into the latrine. It may not be a great painting, but it does remind me that curiosity will land you in the shit from time to time.

  I also have a photograph taken between 1912 and 1919 of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado with the rest of the staff at the school where he taught in Baeza. As you may remember from my reminiscence bump, I spent three months in Baeza writing, and the picture was a gift from a teacher there and the editor of a magazine that published a short story of mine.

  On one of the shelves there is a camera which my grandfather gave to my dad in 1958. My dad was around ten; it was when Khrushchev became leader of the Soviet Union, President Eisenhower established NASA, and Elvis bought Graceland for $100,000. It has a wonderful metallic click when you press down the shutter and reminds me of the passage of time and how we may shape the legacy we leave behind.

  Meik Wiking

  When I look around, I realize I have not furnished the room with paintings and objects, I have furnished it with stories.

  Manifestations of stories do not have to be expensive things. If your family has a redemption story about eating raw porridge on a freezing, windy beach, a simple rock from that beach might make your kids think about that fun, crazy experience that brought you closer as a family. But, of course, everything in moderation. No need to go full Andy Warhol on this.

  THE POWER OF STORIES

  Have you ever been to a party and someone tells a funny story—for instance, their brother used to eat mustard out of the jar and grab their dog by the testicles—and you realize they are telling your story? That is your funny story. Your memory. John is your mustard-eating-dog-testicle-grabbing brother.

  If you have, then you have experienced another memory phenomenon: disputed memories, in which people disagree over who experienced the memory.

  In one study published in 2001, Mercedes Sheen and Simon Kemp, today professors in psychology at different universities but at the time both teaching at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, and David Rubin, who taught at Duke University in the US, conducted three experiments with siblings, including twins.

  In one of the experiments, twenty sets of adult twins were cued with forty-five words and asked to think of a memory for each word. Fourteen of the twenty pairs produced at least one disputed memory: thirty-six disputes in total. Fifteen of these were old disputes—but twenty-one of the disputes were discovered during the experiment.

  The twins were of the same sex and, on average, twenty-seven years old at the time of the experiment, and the disputed memories were of a time when the twins were aged between five and fourteen.

  In one case, both twins thought that they had come twelfth in an international cross-country race; another pair argued over who was in a boat with their father when they saw a tiger shark; and a third set both believed that they fell off a tractor and sprained their wrist.

  And, in the case of eating half a jar of mustard and grabbing the dog by the testicles, both claimed that the other twin did it. I say we put the dog on the witness stand.

  In the second experiment, siblings—but not twins—of around the same age were also found to disagree on the ownership of memories, but less often than twins. It makes sense that twins should have more incidents of shared ownership of a memory. They are exactly the same age and more likely to have had some of the same experiences, compared to regular siblings.

  In a third experiment, the researchers found that disputed memories are remembered as more vivid—higher in imagery and emotional reliving—compared to non-disputed memories. In part, this may be down to the fact that these are disputed memories and the participants are keen to convince the researchers that the memories are in fact theirs.

  But what is the reason for these disputed memories in the first place? Why do two or more people seem to have the same memory?

  Well, if you are a diamond-level conspiracy theorist, you might say it was a glitch in the matrix. But it may also be due to what is known as the memory-source problem.

  Let me give you an example. I’ve written before about hygge—the Danish art of creating a nice atmosphere—and when I talk about hygge, I will often try to explain what it is with the following story:

  One December just before Christmas, I was spending the weekend with some friends at an old cabin. The landscape was covered in snow, which brightened the shortest day of the year. When the sun set, at around four in the afternoon, we would not see it for seventeen hours, and we headed inside to get the fire going. We were all tired from hiking and, in a semicircle around the fireplace in the cabin, people were half asleep, wearing big sweaters and woollen socks. The only sounds you could hear were the stew boiling, the sparks from the fireplace and someone having a sip of their mulled wine. Then one of my friends broke the silence.

  “Could this be any more hygge?” he asked rhetorically.

  “Yes,” one of the girls said after a while. “If there was a storm raging outside.”

  We all nodded.

  Last year, I shared this story in St Petersburg and, afterwards, a member of the audience said that she could hear the fire crackling. Sometimes, we manage to bring stories to life. To make them so vivid that our listeners experience it with their own senses. We use some of our own personal experiences to do this. When you hear the hygge story, you know from your own personal experience what a crackling fire sounds like, how the smoke from dry wood smells, and how the flames dance between re
d, yellow and blue, you know how the fire feels, warming your front but leaving your back cold.

  So you take details from other experiences, from other sources, and add them to the story. The story is now more vivid, it has details about your personal experiences, so you can start to believe that it is your story—your memory. You feel you have witnessed it with your own eyes, but in fact you heard it from someone else and the hippo in the director’s chair just got creative.

  What great storytellers do is bring the stories to life. Stories well told become experiences, stories so vivid you feel you witness it with your own eyes. What we can learn from this is that we might be able to help our loved ones rebuild a memory that they have lost—and rebuild it in such a manner that they don’t know it is a replica.

  THE MANDELA EFFECT

  One of the most popular TV series in Denmark is Matador, a drama about life in a small town in Denmark set in the Great Depression and throughout the Nazi occupation.

  In one episode, the character Misse, an anxious elderly spinster, gets married to teacher Andersen. However, on their wedding night, Andersen turns into a “wild beast,” according to Misse, as he wants to consummate the marriage. She locks him out on the balcony and he stands there all night in the cold, yelling.

  Many Danes will describe that scene. Andersen in his pyjamas yelling at Misse. Banging on the door. The only issue is that the scene was never shown or filmed. However, many Danes believe they have seen it, but in fact it was their imagination creating that scene—and the subsequent memory of it—in their mind.

  This is known as the Mandela effect—where many people have a false memory about something. The name comes from the phenomenon that a lot of people remember that Nelson Mandela died in prison in the eighties and TV coverage of his death and funeral from that time—even though he was released from prison, became president and lived until 2013.