The Art of Making Memories

by Meik Wiking

  That day was a 6.

  By the way, Mamen did like Alejandro. They are getting married this year.

  Combining the data for each day with a description of each day enables him to understand what happens on his happy days. What Alejandro finds is that the best days are about connection—connecting with our loved ones. They’re about friends, family and romantic love. About feeling special.

  I think one of the coolest things about Alejandro’s data set is that he enables the experiencing self to be heard in the present. How we remember something is one thing, but another thing is how we actually experienced it. For instance, Alejandro might think back to his trip to Indonesia and remember the sandy beaches, but if he goes back and examines the data for those dates, he finds that his experiencing self was troubled by the heat and the mosquitos. If you understand Spanish, you can follow Alejandro’s blog at 11anhosymedio.blogspot.com You may also take inspiration from Alejandro and consider alternative ways of making a diary. It doesn’t have to be data—I’ve seen someone who has recorded a second each day for the past years to create a beautiful video montage.

  THE PERFECT META-MEMORABILIA

  Imagine you are presenting your new book about making memories to a group of journalists.

  There are a lot of other speakers presenting their new, exciting books and you want to ensure that the audience remembers you. Then you remember the pineapple principle. Bring something on stage that will grab their attention and stick in their memory. You look around the hotel room. There is a small statue of the head of a horse. It is perfect. You take the statue on stage and your speech goes well. You see how your words resonate with the audience. Their faces light up. They nod. They laugh. You’re talking about how to make our lives unforgettable by making moments memorable and you realize that this is one of those moments. This moment will be a memory. A memory in the making about the book about making memories. It’s very meta. You bring the statue back to the hotel and you realize that the statue is now the manifestation of the meta-memory experience. You realize that this statue is a perfect example of meta-memorabilia. I am not saying that you took the statue. Just because you might have Viking blood in your veins, it doesn’t mean you can’t visit the UK without looting. Pillaging is so ninth century. Twenty-first-century Vikings are all about equality and wealth distribution. They would take the statue from the fancy hotel, leave a £200 tip for the maid and a note suggesting that the money should be spent on making memories. Hypothetically speaking, of course.

  HAPPY MEMORY TIP:

  USE MEMO SNAPS

  Create and use acronyms to help you remember.

  Singing and rhymes help children to learn the alphabet—and we can add acronyms as mnemonic tools for learning. For instance, to remember the North American Great Lakes of Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Eerie and Superior, the acronym HOMES may be useful.

  Or, if you want to memorize the names and order of the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, you could use a phrase like “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos” or, if you don’t want to leave Pluto out in the planetary cold, “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas.”

  You can also harness the power of acronyms and use memo snaps when thinking about how to create memories and hold on to them. Memo snaps.

  Multisensory, Emotional, Meaningful, Outsource, Stories, Novel, Attention, Peak and Struggles—or you can also go with an anagram like Aspen moms, Omen spasm or Mensa poms. Whatever rocks your boat.

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  Conclusion: The Past Has a Bright Future

  Sharing our past with someone is an ingredient in the recipe for falling in love.

  In 1996, Arthur Aron, professor in psychology at Stony Brook University, New York, came up with thirty-six questions that create intimacy between strangers—questions that would make people fall in love. Several of the questions revolve around our memories:

  What is your most treasured memory?

  What is your most terrible memory?

  Tell your life story in as much detail as possible in four minutes . . .

  What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

  If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?

  Share an embarrassing moment in your life . . .

  Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s childhood?

  Knowing about the worst and best things that have happened to someone else is a way to create intimacy. Sharing our greatest accomplishments and worst embarrassments connects us. Sharing our life narratives allows us to see the world with each other’s eyes. According to the inventor of the questions, “one key pattern associated with the development of close relationships among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.” The idea is that mutual vulnerability creates closeness.

  Keeping this in mind, it was interesting to read through people’s memories in our Happy Memory Study. Despite each memory being a snapshot from the life of a stranger, I did feel I got to know them a little bit. I felt connected to them because so many of their stories resonated with me. I understand why that night on the frozen lake was so much fun. I understand how eating raw porridge on a windy beach brought you closer together. I understand how meaningful it felt to walk with your little niece after your grandmother’s funeral.

  To me, that is another testimony of how alike we all are. When it comes to what brings us happiness—and what happy memories are made of—we might be Danish or British, American or Chinese, but we are, first and foremost, human. We all have things we want to remember, and we all have things we want to forget.

  To me, one of the most important things I learned in researching and writing this book is how amazing memories are. Not only do they allow us to travel back in time, to look ahead into the future and impact on how we feel right now, they also enable us to connect with ourselves over time and to connect with other people. But memories can also be a burden that we carry around with us. Not every memory is a happy one.

  THE ART OF LETTING GO—WHY TOO MUCH PAST IS PARALYZING

  In the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind two former lovers undergo a procedure to delete their memories of their romantic but painful relationship.

  We all have things we would like to forget, but we also have the awareness that our memories—even the bad ones—are what make us who we are. In addition, some of us may also dream of having a perfect memory—to be able to remember everything we ever heard, read or experienced. However, we also need to be aware of the downside of a perfect memory.

  What did you do on January 10, 1981? If you were not born then, how about January 10, 1991, or 2001? What was the weather like? What day of the week was it? What happened in the news? If you are like me, you have no idea. Well, if it was January 10, 1981, guessing that Copenhagen was cold and dark is a safe bet. And I was three, so I probably had a jam-packed schedule of eating, crying and drooling.

  But if you are like Jill Price, you may remember that on January 10, 1981 a guerrilla war was launched against the government in El Salvador which would last for eleven years. Jill was driving a car. For the third time. Driving lessons at Teen Auto. She was fifteen. It was a Saturday.

  Jill is one of the very few people in the world with Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM), also known as hyperthymesia. She can recall every day of her life since she was fourteen years old.

  Jill, an American woman living in California, was the first person in the world to be diagnosed with hyperthymesia. It means that Jill experiences continuous automatic playback of events from her life. “Give me the day and I see it. I go back to the day—I just see the day and what I was doing,” she writes. She has been studied by researchers for years. One of them is James McGaugh, a research professor in neurobiology and behavior at the University of California, Irvine. Professor McGaugh and his colleagues have discovered that Jill is not alone. However, fewer tha
n a hundred people globally have been diagnosed with the condition.

  In her book, The Woman Who Can’t Forget: The Extraordinary Story of Living with the Most Remarkable Memory Known to Science, Jill describes her memories as being like scenes from home movies, relentlessly playing over and over again, flashing forwards and backwards—short scenes on constant shuffle mode.

  Jill’s story shows that memories can be both a blessing and a curse. She enjoys having a storehouse of memories she can travel to for comfort, but that storehouse of memories can also become a prison. This seems to echo the experiences of other people with HSAM.

  Well before the world learned about people with hyperthymesia, Jorge Luis Borges wrote about the phenomenon. Borges often writes about philosophical concepts and, in the 1942 story “Funes, the Memorious,” he explores the consequences of a perfect memory. In it, you meet Funes, who can remember the shape of the clouds in the south on April 30, the marbled grain of a leather-bound book he saw once and the pattern of the water spray from an oar during the Battle of Quebracho Herrado. In short, Funes has a pretty good memory.

  Funes is forced to spend his days in a dark room which doesn’t offer any sensory impressions. When Funes recalls the events of the previous day, his memory is so complete that it takes a full twenty-four hours to do so. In addition, the memories become compounded by the recollection of recollection of a recollection. Funes not only remembers every leaf on every tree in every wood but also every time he ever thought of every leaf on every tree in every wood.

  At the end of the story, Funes is no longer capable of processing all the details of his memory. It is not a happy story, but it does give the reader an insight into the downsides of a perfect memory.

  Our memory is at best—in the words of Virginia Woolf in her memoir—a sketch of the past. But despite being faulty, despite the fact that our memory is biased by peaks and ends, it is still worth something. And maybe our happiness depends not only on what we can remember but also on what we are able to forget. Too much past can be paralyzing. We want to hold on to our happy memories, but we also want to be able to let go of the past, to live in the present and plan for the future.

  Reinhold Leitner/Shutterstock

  A SKETCH OF THE FUTURE

  Imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you; the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you.

  On which step of the ladder would you say you personally stand at this time?

  And which step on the ladder do you think you’ll be at in five years?

  If you are like most people, you are likely to give a higher number to the second question than the first. People are optimists. We expect to be happier in the future than we are today.

  In 2018, Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, published a paper examining the answers to these two questions given by 1.7 million people from 166 countries collected between 2006 and 2016 in the Gallup World Poll.

  Deaton found worldwide optimism. Across regions of the world, we are optimistic, but some are more optimistic than others. Looking at the data from Denmark, we can see that people living in the bigger cities are more optimistic: people in Copenhagen and Aarhus believe that life five years from now will be far better than it is today, whereas people in rural areas are more likely to think that life in five years will be pretty much like life is today.

  In part, this has to do with another finding of Deaton’s, which is that younger people are more optimistic about the future. Because there are universities in Copenhagen and Aarhus, there is a greater concentration of younger people in these cities. When comparing their happiness now with their expected happiness five years from now, younger people expect to make a bigger leap. Those aged between fifteen and twenty-four have an average happiness level of 5.5 on a scale from 0 to 10 but expect to achieve a happiness level of 7.2 five years from now. That is a difference of 31 percent—great expectations.

  Optimism is wonderful. Expecting or hoping to be happier in the future is wonderful. However, I think the important question is how to get to that happier time. As I mentioned, our episodic memory is our ability to travel in time. We have explored going back in time, but we can also travel forward. fMRI studies indicate that thinking about the past and thinking about the future activate the same areas of the frontal and temporal lobes in the brain. Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter is one of the researchers looking into this, and he writes that the brain is “fundamentally a prospective organ that is designed to use information from the past and present to generate predictions about the future. Memory can be thought of as a tool used by the prospective brain to generate simulations of possible future events.” So we can use happy memories from the past to plan for happy experiences in the future.

  How would you like to make deposits in the happy memory bank? How would you create days you will remember forever? By now, I hope you have some ideas in the category of anticipatory nostalgia. So let’s start planning.

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  PLANNING A HAPPY AND MEMORABLE YEAR

  Remember that the best part of memories is making them and, although more happy memories seem to stem from summertime, it is possible to make memorable moments all year around.

  Here’s a selection of ideas of how to plan for happy memories throughout the year.

  JANUARY:

  PLAN FOR ASSOCIATION BY DAYS

  If there is no clear association between certain things, it makes it more difficult for us to remember them. For instance, March 14—what did you do on that day? If you are like me, nothing comes to mind. But then I look it up, and March 14 was the date of the European release of the World Happiness Report, which took place in the Vatican—and then I remember a lot of details from that day. I remember where I had breakfast, lunch and dinner. I remember walking around in the Vatican Gardens with a group of happiness researchers and that we saw turtles in the fountains. I remember Andrea Illy from the coffee company pointing out that the happiest countries in the world are also the biggest consumers of coffee.

  So use January to consider how you can use:

  International Day of Happiness (March 20), World Poetry Day and World Forest Day (March 21), World Water Day (March 22), International Jazz Day (April 30), World Migratory Bird Day (I imagine the non-migratory birds are quite pissed off; second Saturday of May), Global Day of Parents (June 1), World Bicycle Day (June 3), International Day of Yoga (June 21), International Day of Friendship (July 30), International Day of Older Persons (October 1), World Teachers Day (October 5), World Science Day (November 10), World Soil Day (December 5) and International Mountain Day (cancelled in Denmark and The Netherlands; December 11).

  For example, you could organize a bicycle trip for friends or family on World Bicycle Day. It’s in June so, in many parts of the world, you may have perfect weather for it. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, planting a tree on World Soil Day might be a nice memory. Or you could try yoga on International Day of Yoga—remember: firsts are more memorable; I still remember my first yoga class. When the instructor asked us to stretch our legs and put the palms of our hands under our feet, she looked at me and said, “Or just see how far down your shins you can reach.”

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  FEBRUARY:

  FACE YOUR FEARS

  One of the happy memories we collected in our study was from a woman from Belgium who remembered the night she went on stage even though she was scared to perform in front of a crowd. I can relate to that. In 8th grade (so I was about thirteen), my class performed a Christmas play for the entire school. I was elf number 13—a very important role. I had one line: “There is someone in the workshop!” I still remember the line today, in part because we rehearsed a lot and in part because I—like most people—used to suffer from glossophobia, fear of public speaking, making it a fearful experience.
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  But facing and overcoming our fears is one of the ways we can apply the emotional highlighter pen to making memories. So face your fears, sign up for the rock-climbing course, the French class or the open-mic night and take the stage. Remember to bring a pineapple.

  MARCH:

  MAKE IT MEMORABLE

  A happy life is a purposeful life. As we saw earlier, meaningful moments matter when it comes to our memory. Spend the month of March taking steps to increase the level of connection you have with people. It may be little things like doing something important for a loved one, or you may want to send a letter of gratitude to those people who have helped you along the way. Those letters are likely to show up in the memories of those who received them when we conduct our next Happy Memory Study.

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  APRIL:

  PAY ATTENTION TO HAPPINESS

  What are the things that bring you happiness? We have seen that memory requires attention. We remember the things we pay attention to. So it is important to consider—and pay attention to—the things which affect our happiness. Usually, five weeks will fall in April. While one or two of them might be short weeks, it nevertheless provides you with a structure to dedicate one week to each of your five senses. What sounds, sights, smells, touches and tastes bring you happiness? The smell of a freshly opened bag of coffee? The way soft rainwater feels on your skin on a warm spring day? The sound of your children or your best friend laughing? Try and really pay attention and note how they laugh. If you were to play them in a movie, how would you imitate their laugh? You may want to write these things down. That way, you can also see changes in the things that bring you happiness and so create a catalog of things which bring you happiness if you need inspiration for what to do at the weekend.