by Meik Wiking
You might suffer from the Mandela effect, too. Remember the iconic scene in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back where Luke is fighting Darth Vader?
“If only you knew the power of the Dark Side. Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father,” says Vader, and Luke replies: “He told me enough! He told me you killed him!”
The question is, what does Vader say next? A lot of people will say, “Luke, I am your father.” But that is a false memory—the line is actually: “No, I am your father.”
Oh, and since I mentioned Casablanca earlier, I should probably also mention that the character Bogart plays doesn’t say, “Play it again, Sam.” Rick says, “Play it!” in a frustrated and angry tone.
We often remember things wrongly. Even important, world-changing events.
An example of this is George W. Bush’s memory of seeing the first plane fly into the World Trade Center on September 11 when he was asked a few months later how he had felt when he heard about the attack.
I was in Florida. And my chief of staff, Andy Card—actually, I was in a classroom talking about a reading program that works. And I was sitting outside the classroom, waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower—the TV was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said, “There’s one terrible pilot.” And I said, “It must have been a horrible accident.” But I was whisked off there—I didn’t have much time to think about it, and I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my chief, who was sitting over here, walked in and said, “A second plane has hit the tower. America’s under attack.”
The issue is that, on that morning, there was no footage of the first plane crashing into the building. Bush cannot have seen what he remembers. But our remembering self overhears our experiencing self and turns stories into memories.
WHERE DID I LEAVE MY FORGETTING CURVE?
What was the last TV show you watched? For me, the answer is Babylon Berlin, an awesome German crime drama that takes place in Berlin in 1929 under the Weimar Republic—and the answer is also relatively easy because I watched it last night.
If the question had been which TV show did you watch two months ago, or a year ago, the answer would have been harder to find and perhaps wrong.
We have an easier time remembering things that happened recently. One of the first to explore this phenomenon was Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist. Of course he was. How could he not be with that name—taste it—Hermann Ebbinghaus—he has to be a German psychologist.
Ebbinghaus discovered the forgetting curve by conducting a simple experiment on himself.
He studied his ability to remember nonsense syllables consisting of consonant-vowel-consonant combinations without meaning or association. So WID or ZOF could work, but DOT would not, as it is an actual word, and neither would BOL, as it sounds like “ball.”
By the way, I think Ebbinghaus could have made a great management consultant. “Your KPIs in Q4 in the B2B portfolio are down. Must be the SEO, ’cause the CR has dropped and the CPC has increased by 30 percent.”
Ebbinghaus would test his memory of these syllables again and again after various time periods and record the results. This was the 1880s, so there were not a lot of options in terms of entertainment.
Ebbinghaus was among the first scientists to perform actual experiments to understand how memory works. Prior to him, most contributions to the study of memory had been done by philosophers and had been speculation or observational descriptions. Ebbinghaus plotted the results of his ability to remember the syllables on a graph, creating what today is known as the “forgetting curve.” The curve shows the decline of memory retention in time.
You can see how information is lost over time when there is no attempt to retain it. After twenty minutes, you lose around 40 percent, and after one day, around 70 percent of the information is lost.
HAPPY MEMORY TIP:
STAY AHEAD OF THE FORGETTING CURVE
Help your kids and loved ones hold on to happy memories by retelling happy anecdotes.
Ebbinghaus made another discovery: we can alter the slope of the forgetting curve if we repeat the learned information at particular intervals. It is not just about repetition; there has to be space between the reviews. It will not work if you repeat and review something you want to remember twenty times in an hour. If the fact is already in the front of your mind, there is no work being done to enable you to recall it. You have to give your brain a workout. If the information is retrieved at intervals, then the brain has to reconstruct that memory, and this strengthens it, like you strengthen a muscle by using it. Today, the principle is known as “spaced repetition,” where the material we want to learn is reviewed and repeated after intervals of time that become larger and larger.
I think all parents are interested in ensuring that their kids have lasting happy memories—and helping them staying ahead of the forgetting curve by retelling stories of happy experiences might be a tool for that.
So when you want to hold on to happy memories and have your kids hold on to happy times, one way could be to talk about them that night, but also the next day, then a week later, a month later, three months later, a year later.
PUPPIES AND NAPPIES
“What is the earliest thing you remember?”
For the past few years, I’ve been asking a lot of people that question. The answers have varied from getting a puppy to—as one of my friends, who shall remain nameless, admitted—having his nappy changed. My earliest memory is from the age of four. “How old are you?” my grandparents ask, and I cross my leg over the other to create the number four with my legs. I admit that, set against puppies and nappies, my earliest memory is relatively dull. Different studies of childhood memories reach different conclusions, but there seems to be some kind of consensus in the field of memory research that the earliest childhood memory is, on average, from the age of around three and a half.
That doesn’t mean we don’t remember things when we are younger than that. Katherine Nelson, a psychologist, was the first to explore early childhood episodic memory, in the eighties. She used a hidden tape recorder to document the things some children talk to themselves about when they are about to fall asleep—narratives from the crib. One girl, Emily, who was twenty-one months old at the time, would tell herself stories from the day. Car broke down. Had to ride in the green car. Clearly, this is episodic memory.
Some people say they remember being born, but there is little evidence that these are actual memories. Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of childhood or infantile amnesia to describe our inability to retrieve episodic memories from our very first years. In recent years, more studies have shed light on what kind of childhood memories are remembered.
One study from 2014 by Wells, Morrison and Conway, three British psychologists, published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, examined which details can be remembered in adult recollections of childhood memories.
A hundred and twenty-four people took part in the experiment and were instructed to write about two positive and two negative earliest childhood memories—in total, 496 memories. The participants were asked about nine details concerning the different memories: Who was present? Where did it take place? What was the weather like? What were you wearing? And so on. They were instructed not to guess but to answer only if they believed they remembered the detail.
People were able to remember more details from positive than from negative memories: on average, 4.84 details out of 9 from the good stuff versus 4.56 details from the bad stuff. Most people (85 percent) could remember where the memory took place, half could remember how old they were at the time, but only 10 percent could remember what they were wearing.
Eighteen percent of the positive memories centered around achievements—for example, learning to ride a bike—13 percent were about birthdays and Christmases and getting presents, and 10 percent were about trips and holidays.
The negative memories typically concerned illnesses or,
for example, breaking a leg (25 percent), being scared or being bullied (14 percent), and death, either of a family member or a pet (11 percent).
I think the take-home message from the studies on childhood memories is that evidence suggests that our memories are linked to our language ability, that is, our memories start staying with us at the time we begin to be able to tell stories about our life—and, therefore, we can shape our memories by choosing which stories to tell and by choosing which activities are likely to yield fond childhood memories for our children.
Your children may forget their own earliest happy memories. So even though it is their happy memory, maybe you can hold on to it for a while and give it back to them when they are old enough to carry it forward.
On average, 4.84 details out of 9 from the good stuff versus
4.56 details from the bad stuff
EMBRACING THE ROLE OF MEMORY ARCHITECT
Some of my happiest childhood memories take place in the landscape around the cabin my family and I lived in from May to September each year.
In June, the nights were blue and bonfires lit up along the coast. In the forest, we would climb trees and search for berries. In the hills, we would explore fox tunnels and look for hidden Nazi gold. In the fields, we would “help” drive the tractors and build houses from bales of hay. By the streams, we would fish and build dams. By the beach, we would swim and, if we got cold, we would dig our way under the small boats turned upside down to keep warm.
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Katrina White/EyeEm/Getty Images
The smell of hay, the taste of raspberries and the warmth of a wooden boat that has been soaking up heat all day still take me back to those days. Those were simple times. Those were happy times.
And I am not alone: simple pastimes such as climbing trees and running around barefoot outside in the summertime until dark are also among the most treasured childhood memories in Britain.
In 2016, a survey commissioned by New Covent Garden Soup collected answers from 2,000 adults and the results revealed the most typical childhood memories in Britain: 73 percent said the beach played a part in their happiest memories. In addition, according to the study, our childhood memories are ten times more likely to be from events that took place in the summer, compared to the other seasons.
Furthermore, it seems that we are keen on having our children enjoy the same happy memories by experiencing the same happy times we did. More than half of parents surveyed said they have visited a destination with their own family they visited themselves as a child in an attempt to re-create fond memories.
THE FIFTY MOST COMMON CHILDHOOD MEMORIES
1.Family holidays
2.Hide and seek
3.Collecting shells on the beach
4.Hopscotch
5.Watching Top of the Pops
6.Sports days
7.Watching children’s TV
8.Fish and chips
9.Pic ’n’ mix sweets
10.Playground games (British bulldog, etc.)
11.Pencil cases
12.Climbing trees
13.Egg-and-spoon races
14.Recording the music charts on a Sunday
15.School dinners
16.Collecting toys/cards/etc.
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17.Ice creams from the ice cream van
18.Playing outside until it was dark
19.Paddling in the sea
20.Dinner ladies
21.Your teeth falling out and putting them under your pillow
22.Kiss chase
23.Fighting with siblings
24.Fishing for tadpoles in a pond
25.Going to Woolworths to buy records
26.Playing on a rope swing in the woods
27.School field trips
28.Visiting cousins
29.Making daisy chains and wearing them around your head
Eric Anthony Johnson/Getty Images
30.Going back-to-school shopping at the end of the summer holiday
31.Getting up really early in the morning to go on holiday
32.Reading magazines
33.Exploring rock pools
34.Using jumpers for goal posts
35.School tuck shop
36.Playing in the paddling pool
37.Ice cream floats
38.Running around barefoot outside
39.Sleepovers with friends
40.School packed lunches
41.Swimming in a cold sea
42.Playing tennis against the back of the house
43.Scratch-and-sniff stickers
44.First time getting told off by a teacher
45.Staying up late for New Year’s parties
46.Sliding on the grass in school uniform
47.Paper rounds
48.Going camping
49.Playing games on long car journeys
50.Singing in the back of the car
Meik Wiking
HAPPY MEMORY TIP:
RENAME PLACES WITH MEMORIES
Combine autobiographical and spatial memory.
Spatial memory records information about our environment and spatial orientation and makes us able to navigate around a familiar city. It helps us remember where an object is located and has helped us survive as a species. Nuts are found here, fresh water there. These days it’s “The coffee’s there, and there’s the power socket for my phone.” But the principle is the same. Finding one’s way around is crucial in everyday life and you are likely to be better at it than remembering names at parties.
You may be able to use your great spatial memory to your advantage to hold on to happy memories. The idea is simple: rename places. If a certain place was the scene of a happy memory, start referring to that place by the happy memory.
Every summer, I go to the island of Bornholm, a beautiful rock island in the Baltic Sea. I have a tiny cabin there and the areas around the cabin have been the scene of many fond memories. Many of them have to do with foraging. There’s the Wild Cherry Forest, Juniper Lane, Elderflower Gorge, Raspberry Fortress, Spearfishing Bay and Skinny-dip Cove.
Some of these places have official names. Raspberry Fortress is in fact called Lilleborg and consists of the ruins of a twelfth-century Viking keep, but that name would not remind me of a wonderful afternoon eating raspberries—or where to get raspberries the following summer.
Chapter VIII
Outsource Memory
There is a website called The Burning House, and it’s a collection of pictures of things people around the world would save if their house was on fire. It allows a wonderful peek into the human mind and heart. What are our most treasured possessions?
Diaries, letters from Grandma before she died, scrapbooks, Marilyn Monroe’s autograph, a mixtape from my aunt, my grandfather’s old nautical compass, a doll containing a secret from my best friend, Nutella and a bottle of Jack Daniels.
The answers are diverse and sometimes reveal a conflict between what’s materially valuable and what’s of purely sentimental value. But there is one common denominator that runs across the answers. The most common thing people would take out of their burning house is their photo albums.
I am no different. I see photos as the key to a vault of memories. If the key was lost, I fear that the memories would be sealed off forever.
This year, I brought home a collection of photo albums—photos from my childhood which my brother and I packed up after our mother died, photos I hadn’t seen in twenty years.
They bear witness to how time has passed: the eighties, the dungarees, phones with a rotary dial . . .
The photos are not of great quality. Nor were they taken by master photographers. My mother had a special gift for cropping half the face outside the frame.
But the photos are full of association triggers. As I see them, memories resurface, or snapshots of emotions, then a whole range of other connections start to be made.
Meik Wiking
There is a picture of our do
g, Pussy (I know it was a weird name for a dog, okay)—and I remember the time she fell through the ice and my dad rescued her.
I see a picture of me on my first bicycle—and I remember my first accident, riding straight into a rubbish bin.
I see a picture with my mother’s golden Volkswagen Beetle in the background—and I remember how she always left her keys inside and that, by the age of ten, I had learned to pick the lock with a wire.
I see a picture of me reading with my grandpa in the lounge chair—my favorite place to read in our summer cabin—and I remember reading Astrid Lindgren and Tintin books under the blanket and planning my own adventures there.
Meik Wiking
Meik Wiking
I look at the pictures and feel grateful for every time someone pressed down on the shutter.
