Remember More, Forget Less

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In 2011, the race for U.S. president was heating up. Near the front of the pack on the Republican side was Rick Perry. His odds looked promising. He had been governor of Texas for more than a decade, and the previous Republican president, George W. Bush, had also been a Texas governor. Rick Perry's poll numbers were competitive, And he had amassed an impressive war chest. His core themes of shrinking government and cutting spending were popular with many Republican voters. Tonight, we are here in the great state of Michigan for a debate that will focus almost exclusively on the economy and how— On November 9th, Rick Perry appeared onstage in Rochester, Michigan, along with 7 fellow candidates. It was a live televised debate watched by millions. The moderator asked a question about what the candidates would do in office if elected.

But the fact of the matter is we better have a plan in place that Americans can get their hands around, and that's the reason my flat tax is the only—

Rick Perry launched energetically into a description of the actions he planned to take as president and his sweeping plans to slash the size of government.

Under his leadership, he vowed, entire departments And I will tell you, it's 3 agencies of government when I get there that are gone: Commerce, Education, and the— what's the third one there?

Let's see.

Commerce, Education, and the— You can't name the third one? The third agency of government. I would do away with Education, the Commerce Department, Commerce. Commerce.

And let's see.

I can't. The third one I can't.

Sorry. Oops.

That oops on national TV helped sink Rick Perry's presidential aspirations. All of his careful preparation and fundraising came to nothing. His memory had betrayed him when he needed it most. The following year, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney was chosen as the Republican Party's nominee for president. This week on Hidden Brain, the mysteries of memory. How it works, why it fails us, and how to build memories that stick. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Planet Visionaries. Professional climber and environmental advocate Alex Honnold hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast spotlighting the people tackling climate challenges with real, hopeful solutions. Throughout season 6, Alex brings together extraordinary changemakers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Southern New Hampshire University. Science consistently tells us learning starts with motivation. That's why SNHU offers over 200 flexible, affordable online programs to help you get where you want to go. Take classes that spark your curiosity, shape your skill set, and prepare you for what's next. A degree can help move you forward, no matter what motivates you. Start yours at snhu.edu/brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com/hiddenbrain. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. So much of daily life depends on our memories— getting to important events on time, remembering a friend's birthday, executing skills in the workplace. But our memories often don't work the way we wish. Even in the absence of neurological disorders, Perfectly healthy people find they forget important things all the time. At the University of Virginia, psychologist Daniel Willingham has observed many lapses of memory in his own life. In his lab, he has studied different ways that our memory can fail us and how we can fix it. Dan Willingham, welcome to Hidden Brain.

Thank you so much.

Happy to be here. Dan, when you were a college student, you enrolled in a course You were sure you were going to get an easy A in. What was this course, Dan?

It was a physical anthropology course. I took this course solely because I thought it was going to be an easy A, and then it turned out eventually to be the lowest grade that I got in any college course.

I'm assuming you must have gone and talked to the professor and tried to make your case, as students are wont to do.

I did, and I said exactly what today my students say to me. I said, I'm very confused. I'm certain that I knew this content very well, and yet I did very poorly on your test, so I'm here to try to figure out how I can do better in your course, which is really polite double-talk for, that was a terrible test. It was really unfair. This, of course, did not fool the professor in the least, and he said, so you feel like you knew the content? I said, yes, absolutely. He said, okay, well, so for example, we talked about different categories of stone tools, and you understand? Yes, I absolutely understand. So why don't you tell me about the different categories of stone tools? So I sputtered a bit and then eventually said, well, you know, I understand it, I just can't explain it. So there was sort of a mismatch between my perception of what my memory was like and what my memory was actually like in the context of the test.

You know, so psychologists sometimes call this the illusion of explanatory depth. We think we know things, but when challenged to actually produce that knowledge, we come up short. And this happens all the time to us, right, Dan?

It really does. The way you would think that you would judge whether or not you know something is really just sort of look at your memory and see whether or not you know it. But it turns out there are a number of different ways we make this judgment. And so that's one of the ways you can go wrong, is using the wrong cue to decide whether or not you know something.

I want to bring up another incident that I think reveals a different way in which our memories can fail us. So after college, you went on to graduate school in psychology, and one day your advisor called a really big and important lab meeting one day. Tell me what happened.

Yeah, my advisor was a brilliant psychologist. He actually was a winner of the National Medal of Science, but he was Rather forbidding. He was sort of known for very long pauses during conversations during which you had to assume he was thinking, but you didn't know what he was thinking. So yes, we were all pretty frightened of him. What happened was that I forgot about the meeting, and the irony was that the meeting was happening in sort of a bullpen area right outside my office door. So I had my office door closed. I was happily, you know, reading, or I don't know what in the world I was doing. But the last That meeting was happening 10 feet away from me, and I expect they were saying, where's Willingham? I just had no idea. So yeah, that's a failure of what psychologists call prospective memory, where you're planning to remember something, and in this case, obviously failing dreadfully to remember it.

I almost hesitate to ask, did you hear from your advisor about it?

Yes, I went to talk to him about it, and yeah, the duration of the time between I said something about it and he responded was probably 20 seconds or something, during which I was squirming. And he did say, like, oh, it's okay. It happens to all of us. But it was extremely uncomfortable, yeah.

Now, lots of us feel that some memories are immune from lapses. When we learn something well, we feel, okay, I've got this. In your first year of teaching, Dan, you were explaining a basic concept in statistics to a class of students. What were you trying to teach? And tell me what happened.

Yeah, very basic, sort of like it was probably the second week of class. I think I was teaching about skewness of distributions. So many of your listeners probably are familiar with the bell-shaped curve. So curves can not only be bell-shaped, they can be kind of fat at one end and then skinny at the other. And that skinny part might be on the left or on the right. And so this is referred to as the skewness of the distribution. And we talk about a distribution having either a positive or a negative skew depending on which side is fat and which is skinny. And I could not— while I'm teaching this undergraduate course, I just blanked on which was positive and which was negative. And you can't get much more elementary than that, but yeah, I just lost it. And of course, the more I tried to think about it, the more uncertain I became and it just evaded me.

So embarrassing failures of memory can happen in small private interactions and also on very big public stages. And in some cases, the costs of these memory breakdowns can be far worse than an awkward moment. They can actually be astronomical. I want you to listen to this news report from 2021. San Francisco resident Stefan Thomas lost the key to unlock his digital wallet that holds 7,000 bitcoins.

That translates to a whopping $220 million. The correct password is locked in a hard drive that gives users 10 guesses before it locks forever.

Thomas has only 2 more tries to gain access to his fortune. So Stefan Thomas never did remember his password, Dan. Can you imagine what it must feel like to not remember a password that leads to a gigantic fortune? It's like being locked out of your own life.

Yeah, I mean, I've never had a gigantic fortune, so I am sort of— I'm getting a little fanciful here in imagining it. But yeah, certainly we've all been there in terms of forgetting passwords. This happens to everybody these days. But what is startling is his confidence that he was going to remember this. Our judgment of our memory is often faulty. I vaguely remember writing the password down, putting it somewhere safe. Unfortunately, I think the chances of me just remembering the password are unfortunately very slim.

Stefan Thomas is not alone. Some cryptocurrency experts estimate that around 20% of Bitcoin holdings worldwide appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets. So why does memory let us down when we most depend on it? When we come back, counterintuitive truths about how memory works. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Quince. We all have those pieces in our closet that we can count on: the versatile jacket, the perfect t-shirt. These are the pieces that make getting dressed easy, and that's what Quince does best. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials using premium materials in designs that are timeless, thoughtfully crafted, and made to be worn again and again. And when the temperatures start to drop, Quince makes it easy to build on these everyday staples with versatile layers designed to keep you warm and comfortable all season long. Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Hidden Brain. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At the University of Virginia, Dan Willingham studies why our memories fail us and how we can become better learners. Dan, in most domains of our lives, we all believe our intentions shape our outcomes. If I want something badly enough, I will take the steps to make it happen. I understand yet you were in graduate school when you first grappled with the question of whether this principle works when it comes to memory. Does our wanting to remember something help us to remember it?

It is amazing. It has literally no impact at all in that there are things that we really want to remember. For example, the key to our Bitcoin, or anytime you meet someone, you would really like to remember their name, right? And of course, we know we very often don't.

Yeah.

And then too, there are so many things that you remember that you never had any intention of remembering, much less have any interest in remembering.

Right.

So that should give us a little bit of a clue, and laboratory experiments back this up. You can tell people, listen, your memory is going to be probed later, or not tell them that, and it has no impact on whether or not they eventually remember something.

You know, you said something really interesting a second ago, which is that it's not just the case that we fail to remember things that we want to remember. But that we regularly remember things that we don't care to remember. So there's something really strange going on here, which is that our memories don't seem to follow our volition, our intention. They seem to have almost a mind of their own in some ways. What is it about the nature of the brain, Dan, that makes our intentions to remember something not matter very much when it comes to actually remembering it?

This is speculation, of course, but it It seems to make a certain amount of evolutionary sense that this would not be a great way to set up a brain, uh, because our judgment in the moment may not be very good. So your memory system sort of lays its bets in a different way. It doesn't store what it is that you think ought to be stored, and instead, whatever it is you think about a whole lot, it's probably something you're going to have to think about again. And so that increases the probability that it's going to end up in the memory system. Hmm.

So from an evolutionary point of view, the argument you're making here is that if something is occupying our mind, then it's in some ways reasonable and logical to infer that that thing must be important, and therefore it makes sense in some ways to devote the resources of memory to actually preserving the thing that we're thinking about.

That's exactly it. And there are— when we say occupy your mind, we need to be precise about what that would mean, because there are different ways your mind can be occupied. You can be thinking about something for a long period of time, but thinking about it in a pretty shallow, sort of robotic way, and that's not going to be very good for memory. Or you can think about something briefly, but in a really deep way where you're thinking about what it means, you're connecting it to other things that you know, and that's going to be really good for memory.

Now, a second assumption that we make about memory is that Developing a pleasing sense of familiarity with the material will allow us to remember it later. So, you know, I feel like this happens all the time as well. You have to give a speech and you read over your script 20 times until you feel confident you have it. You say this confidence may be a secret enemy when it comes to memory. Why is that, Dan?

Yeah, because that confidence is coming from familiarity, and familiarity is not exactly the same type of memory that you usually So familiarity is the sense that I have encountered this before, and you can make that judgment very rapidly. Other connected information is usually retrieved more slowly and will take a little bit more effort. So for example, you may see someone on the street and think, oh, they look familiar, and then you can't quite place them. So you start trying to think, do I know them from work? Do they go to a shop that I go to? And what you're essentially doing is generating memories. Memory cues to try to help you get more information about who this person is and place them. So we're used to this idea that there's often this very quick sense of familiarity, and then there may be more information in there, but we're going to have to dig for it. So this is where familiarity can lead you astray. We're used to the idea that familiarity is often followed by other information if we put in a little bit more effort. It could be there is no other information. And so as you're preparing for that speech, all you've done is by reading it over and over and over again is give yourself a very strong sense of familiarity, but you're not actually able to remember the speech, which is what you're going to need to be able to do later.

What is the alternative strategy to reading a speech 20 times and feeling confident that we have memorized it?

Engage the mental processes that you're actually going to need at the time. So what you're going to want to do is to be able to give the speech with only occasional reference to your notes. So you need to practice giving the speech with only occasional reference to your notes. The thing about that, of course, is that's going to be It's going to feel harder, and it's going to feel like you're failing a lot more frequently, but this is what you actually need to do, and that's what's going to be best for memory.

You know, I'm thinking that when we are trying to learn something, very often when we look back at the material in a textbook, for example, and we say, yeah, I'm familiar with it, that looks right, I know what that is, partly what we're doing is we're reassuring ourselves that we know the material. What I'm hearing you say is that a better strategy, though perhaps more unpleasant, is to actually try and unearth the specific places in our knowledge where we are actually lacking. So rather than trying to show us, prove to ourselves that we know the material, to actually prove to ourselves where we don't know the material, our weaknesses, can tell us where to focus.

I think that's exactly right. You need to test yourself, see what you know and what you don't know, and then work on the part that you don't know. It sounds very obvious when you've You've articulated it the way you have. But even though it sounds obvious when you say it, it's something that most people don't do.

I remember talking to Angela Duckworth many years ago after she wrote her book on grit. One of her studies was looking at spelling bee champions. The thing that she found was that spelling bee champions obviously put in a lot of time in preparation, but they also did what she called deliberate practice. The way she defined deliberate practice was very similar to what you're talking about, Dan, which is It was a process of deliberately trying to identify areas of weakness and focus on those areas of weakness. And of course, that has to be very unpleasant and difficult to do.

Absolutely. And this is one of the things that define people with grit is that they're able to face up to these sorts of difficult tasks and focus on one thing at a time and say, OK, this particular passage of this piece of music I'm trying to learn, this is what I'm really having difficulty with. And in addition, the other aspect of deliberate practice that's really important is thinking of strategies to overcome this difficulty, you know, being ready to be creative and try different things and experiment to see how you can overcome the problem.

A third assumption we make about memory is that once we know something, we know it, that our work is done. But of course, knowing something doesn't protect us from the fact that there is a silent process that can chip away at at what we know. Can you talk about this, that we imagine we know things, but we often underestimate our capacity to forget them?

This is a really peculiar aspect of memory, and we imagine that the state of our memory now will continue to be the state of our memory in the future. So we completely discount forgetting, and curiously, we do the same thing even when we plan on studying more. So in the experiments, what they'll do is they'll bring people in, they'll have them learn something, and it's, it's something that people have no familiarity with at all. It'll be like English to Swahili translation of vocabulary or something. And they'll say, okay, well, you've studied these 20 words, you're getting about 80% correct. I want you to go home, come back in 2 weeks, we're going to do the same thing again. By the way, how do you think you'll do when you come back for the first time? And people say, well, Well, I'm getting 80%, I guess I'll probably get 80% again. They just completely discount that forgetting will happen in those 2 weeks. And in my experience with my students, once you point this out and explain it, it's not difficult for them to understand, but people just don't think about it if you don't point it out.

So you say that one way to counteract this inevitable process of forgetting is not just to learn, but to overlearn the material we're trying to remember. What does this look like, Dan?

Overlearning means continuing to rehearse and practice some content that you want to learn, even when it seems to you, you know it perfectly well. So suppose you're, you know, working with flashcards or something with our English-Swahili translation, and you're getting them right every time. You're running through the list of flashcards, you're just killing it. Overlearning says, keep going. And you can imagine that as you're doing that, you would think, what is the point of this? I'm getting them all right. I know it. But what you're doing in this process of overlearning is you're protecting against forgetting.

So you spent many years studying how memory works and studying, you know, how to fix lapses in memory. And then you say, okay, let me go out and teach my students. You know, how to learn better, how to be better students. And of course, you're an educator, so it's the perfect setting because students want to learn and remember, you know, the things that they have learned. Tell me about your efforts to teach these ideas to your students. Did they master your insights and start to remember things better?

It really didn't work out the way I thought it was going to work out. I started by talking to the students who were coming to see me because they were unhappy with their progress in my course. And I asked them a lot of detailed questions about, well, what are you doing now? And like, bring in your notes and let's look at them and so on. And so I felt like I was getting pretty good at diagnosing what was going on with each individual student. And I was dispensing this advice and they were nodding and looking like they were taking it all in. And I monitored their grades and I found that they were not improving. So I was very puzzled by this. After about a year of that, I started following up with those students and saying, so we had this conversation. Tell me, did you do what I suggested you do? And I found a very common response was, I tried it and it just felt stupid. It just didn't feel like it was effective at all. And so I stopped doing it.

So in some ways, the things that were effective don't feel like they're effective. And so intuitively, People don't stick to it.

That's exactly right. It's connected to another phenomenon that I discovered and was very interested in, which is that students are not taught in K through 12 how they should study, how to take notes, all the different things they're going to need to do in school. They're certainly not taught about how their memory works. Yet they all seem to use the same strategies for memorization. And the reason is they all gravitate towards strategies that feel effective in the moment and that also aren't that difficult.

The strategies that work to strengthen our memory don't feel satisfying or productive, so we discard them in favor of strategies that feel right but are often less effective or even counterproductive. Like a spring reverting to its old shape, we revert to our easy, intuitive assumptions, even though those assumptions are often wrong. When we come back, how to win the battle with ourselves and start to practice the hard truths uncovered by science that actually make our memories stronger. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights, With insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Maxwell, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Air France. Air France business cabin offers comfort throughout the journey with priority check-in, boarding, and lounge access. Enjoy menus from renowned French chefs, wines and champagne selected by a sommelier, and free high-speed Wi-Fi. When it's time to rest, settle into a fully adjustable lie-flat bed with added mattress comfort. The art of travel elevated, because Air France Business Cabin goes further in every detail to make your journey exceptional. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Dan Willingham is a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia. He studies how memory works and how it fails. Dan is also the author of the book Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy. Dan, we've seen how science has come up with insights into strengthening memory. The problem is that most of us don't use these insights because they don't feel satisfying or easy. You draw an analogy with physical exercise to help people understand your point about the kind of effort that's necessary to create lasting What's the connection between doing push-ups and having a better memory?

Yeah, so imagine that you've got a friend who is trying to gain strength and they want to be able to do lots and lots of push-ups. So you go and visit them one time and see them training, and you find them doing push-ups on their knees. And you say, why in the world do you do— like, if you want to do a lot of regular push-ups, you should do regular push-ups. In fact, instead of regular push-ups, you should do really difficult push-ups, like the ones where you launch yourself off the floor and climb up. And your friend says, yeah, a couple of people have told me that and I tried it, but like I could hardly do any of those push-ups. And the whole point here is I'm trying to do a lot of push-ups, right? So, but look, when I do push-ups on my knees, I can do so many so quickly. So it's sort of the same thing. A lot of times when people are trying to commit things to memory, they're doing the mental equivalent of push-ups on their knees. They're doing things that feel effective in the moment and also feel easy, but of course you need the challenge. And of course, it has to be the right type of challenge. It can't just be any challenge, but the right type of challenge is going to bring you the benefit in the long run.

So let's hear about some of the mental equivalents of doing push-ups that propel you off the floor long enough to clap. You've explained that our memory for a piece of information is related to the mental activities we engage in around that information.

What is the implication of this insight in terms of devising So one of the best things you can do is organize the information that you're trying to learn. Memory loves meaning. When things are meaningful to us, that means that all the bits and pieces of what you're trying to learn are connected to one another so that when you remember part of it, that's going to help dredge up the rest of it. So, for example, if you're trying to learn And then also connecting it to things that you already know something about, that's also helpful. Sort of integrating it into sort of the broader memory web is going to be really helpful. So thinking about why something is true, not just, you know, okay, I've got this fact and this fact and this fact, trying to find a way to organize them, to connect them to one another. And then a lot of times that advice I've just given is a little bit hard to follow. It's a little vague. It's like, think about meaning. Your brain is not set up to just sort of follow a command like that. It works much better if you give yourself a concrete task. So asking yourself why something is true or how to do something, that's more likely to sort of lead you down this path about thinking about what it means.

Right. And in some ways, this is connected to the idea that if I'm just reading a textbook That might not be as effective as reading the textbook, thinking about it, and then actually having to write an exercise that is built around the lessons in that section because it's actually causing me now to say, how can I connect the ideas myself? Do I have sort of a cohesive picture of the whole idea, the meaning of the idea that's in that section?

That's absolutely right. I'll elaborate on what you just said in 2 ways. One is when you said thinking about meaning while you're reading, we've all had the experience of reading, which basically in this case is sort of our eyes drifting over the material, and you get to the bottom of a page and you realize, I've been thinking about lunch. I've not been thinking about this content at all, right? And so even a softer version of that can happen where, yeah, you're sort of thinking about it, but not all that deeply, right? So the other thing is, and this is very common, there are lots of studies showing this, that one of the things that people do is they're reading and they're understanding sentence by sentence, but what they're not doing a lot of is coordinating meaning across sentences and coordinating meaning across paragraphs. Okay, so what does this paragraph mean in light of what I just finished reading? And the little sort of mental exercise you just suggested, like, let me think about Let me see if I can create a summary of this section. Let me look at the subheading for this book that I'm reading and see why the author chose that subheading. That's the kind of thing that's going to encourage you to do this coordination of meaning across sentences and paragraphs, and that's going to be great for memory.

Now, you've pointed out that many well-intentioned classroom exercises don't actually lead students to think about the material in a way that creates lasting memory. Can you tell us about the teacher you heard about who was trying to get his students to learn about the secret network that carried enslaved people to freedom in the 19th century?

Yeah, this was actually— I observed this lesson. So this was a lesson for middle elementary students, probably 4th grade, on the Underground Railroad. And one of the things the teacher was trying to emphasize to them was the Uncertainty for these people trying to make their escape, not only in terms of, you know, being pursued and the danger of it, but also like, where are you going to get food? And how are you going to travel? And so on. And so what the teacher did was actually have them bake biscuits, because this was apparently a mainstay food. And the students probably spent about 30 seconds thinking about the relationship between biscuits and the content, what this had to do with the Underground Railroad, and they probably spent about 20 or 30 minutes thinking about measuring flour, cutting shortening, and so on, right? So what I tell teachers is, listen, you know, students don't remember what they want to remember. They certainly don't remember what their teachers want them to remember. They remember what they think about. So if they're spending most of their time thinking about how to bake biscuits, that's what they're going to get out of the lesson plan.

How do you think the lesson plan should have been changed to get a better outcome?

I think in this case, if the goal was to get the students to think about the practical aspects of what it would be like to try and escape via the Underground Railroad, something where they encourage them to think about, okay, here are your resources. Here are all of the dangers that are facing you. What do you suppose people did in these circumstances? How do you think they solved this problem? That would be a way to get them to think about the aspect of the content that I think was meant to be the focus.

You talk about another technique called elaborative interrogation. What is this, Dan, and how does it work?

This is a technique to improve comprehension and also improve memory where, as you're reading something, you pose questions to yourself and try to answer the questions. It's even more effective if before you start reading the text, you actually look ahead a little bit and make some predictions about what you think you're likely to learn when you read this text, and then then pose questions based on that little preview that you do. And then when you're reading the text, you're thinking about, did I pose good questions? Is this actually what the text is about? And if it is, what are the answers to those questions? And if it's not, what are some better questions? So it's a, it's a wonderful technique.

There's lots and lots of research backing it as a way to prevent that sort of mindless reading, that sort of drift of attention I mean, and all of this in some ways goes back to that idea we talked about, which is that we remember what it is we're mentally engaged with. And so if you want to remember things, you have to find ways to actually engage with the material, not just simply be a passive recipient for it, but actually think about it, engage it, probe it, try and see the connections between that and other ideas, contest it, argue with That's the way you actually remember the material, not just simply listening to it.

That's absolutely right. And these little tricks, I think, help because, again, one of the things that's hard to do is sort of tell yourself, okay, now I'm really going to think deeply about this. You need something more concrete. So the technique like, well, you know, look at the subheadings and try and generate some questions based on that, that gives the mind something to work with. work with where you see what the path forward is instead of just telling people, well, really think about what it means.

Another way of harnessing meaning is to frame the information that you're processing in the form of a story. Tell me about this idea, Dan.

Yes, stories are very effective because stories have connections Stories have causality in them, right? It's in the nature of stories that event B was caused by event A. And so you can think about when there's content that you would like to master, thinking of whether or not it fits well into a story context can be a really effective way of organizing it.

And I understand there's been research that has tested when people get information just as information and when people get information in the form of a story, there are differences in how well people remember the information?

Yeah, absolutely. It's very clever experiments where they took basically the same set of facts that they were hoping to impart to the people who were going to be reading it, and some people read what you would just think of as a straightforward expository essay that laid out the facts, and then other people had the same facts sort of shaped into a story format. Again, the emphasis within the story was on causality, connections among these various pieces. And what they found was that people who read it in story format remembered the information better.

And in some ways, I think this speaks to the idea that what you're talking about is really not just discrete pieces of information, but the architecture of how all this information fits together. And of course, in a well-constructed story, you don't just have a whole bunch of discrete pieces of information. You actually have the entire architecture of the The Lego building, if you will, with all the pieces sort of connected to one another. So to identify, when you're asked to identify any individual piece, you have a sense of where it sits in the overall scheme.

Absolutely. I mean, the connections are so important. And I mean, some everyday evidence about this, think about the last time someone— you went to a movie and the next day someone asked you, oh, you saw that movie. What was that about? No one ever says, oh, I don't know, like, I didn't study it, you know, I just saw it.

I didn't—

I can't remember it. No, the memory just comes for free when you're engaged with a story. And it is, as you say, it's all these Lego pieces fitting together because that's so intrinsic to the way memory works. You remember things based on cues. You get a hint. I say this and then, you know, I say salt, that makes you think of pepper. These 2 things are connected in memory. So in a story, everything is connected to something else. So it's sort of like at the beginning of the story, it's like you're pulling out this very fine chain and the little pieces of the story are like little charms attached to the chain. You just keep tugging and it keeps coming out and it's easy to remember.

You and others have talked about different elements in stories that are worth thinking about if we wanted to construct stories to remember things. What are these elements that we should focus on then?

Conflict is the way it's usually described in story structure. In Star Wars, is Luke going to be able to save the civilization by destroying the Death Star? He needs something to fight against, so it's going to be Darth Vader. With our combined strength, we We can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy. I'll never join you! And then there, again, there are— when you're thinking about story structure, you're usually thinking about multiple pieces. So the other aspect in addition to conflict is complication. So the first try at the solution to the problem that you've figured out usually doesn't work for one reason or another. That's a complication. Then there's a subproblem that you have to figure out. And again, that makes for very nice connections that helps you sort of keep it all organized in your mind and easier to remember.

Can you also talk about the role that characters play in our memories? The characters that we encounter in stories would seem to be an important component of what makes stories memorable.

Absolutely. And again, you know, if there are people in what you're trying to remember, that's going to be really helpful. Individual personalities Distinctiveness helps memory. Things that stand out because they're unlike other things that you've encountered, that's a very general principle of memory, that things that are really distinctive are much easier to remember. So if you've got individual people, then that's great. If you don't have individual people, you can still think of something analogous in your story where sort of the action is. I was describing this to a physicist and he immediately said energy. In any physical system, I always look for the energy because that's where the action is going to be. And I don't know enough physics to really evaluate whether or not that was right, but his eyes lit up when he was telling me that. So that's a way of thinking about the role of character, not just in stories where they're actually people, but in other types of stories as well.

And I'm thinking about plays or movies, you know, a movie like A Beautiful Mind, I think did far more to popularize the ideas of John Nash, the mathematician, than any number of mathematics textbooks. And Hamilton, the play, probably did more for US history and American history and people, students understanding American history, than countless history classes.

After the war, I went back to New York.

I finished up my studies.

Yes, those were beautiful examples of character-driven stories. At the very same time, Alexander Hamilton began to climb. How to account for his rise to the top? Man, the man is nonstop.

Gentlemen of the jury, I'm curious— So sometimes, Dan, the information we have to memorize is not in itself very meaningful. So let's say you're trying to remember the names of all the presidents of the United States. There's obviously no meaning to the names. There's no story to connect. all the names together, what do we do?

The go-to method here is a mnemonic, and mnemonics are ways of lending meaning to something that doesn't have any meaning, or other times it's another sort of a trick that helps the information become easier to pull out of memory.

Have you done this? Are there mnemonics that you still remember from your childhood?

Absolutely. And my— in junior year of high school, my My teacher asked all of us to memorize the US presidents in order and taught us a little mnemonic song to commit them to memory.

I'm going to put you on the spot here, Dan. Let's give it a go.

Wajmah, J.V., Hut, Putt, Fumble, J.G., Hay-Gee, A.C., Haysy, McRue, Tawoo, Haku, Hooroo, Tremecan, John X. Ford, Carrigan, Bush.

What does that stand for? I'm sort of starting to pick up the outlines of the names there.

Yeah, so it's the first letter of each president's name. So it starts Wajama. So W is Washington, Adams. Jama, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams. JV, Jackson, Van Buren. And then occasionally you have to remember some things. So like Trumakin is Truman, and then Ike for Eisenhower, and then it ends Ken for Kennedy. So there are little bits in there where you have to do some interpretation, but of course that's not hard. And I will say, I probably recite that little rhyme to myself once or twice a year when, for some reason, I'm trying to think, now, who was probably president at that point? Needless to say, you have to be kind of quiet when you do it. Socially, it's a little awkward.

So we've talked about how easy it is for us to feel a sense of familiarity with a given set of facts. But instead of familiarity, you suggest that we need to adopt a new standard of what it means to know something, something that can overcome our illusion of explanatory depth, where we believe we know things better than we actually know them. What is the technique that you suggest, Dan?

Most of the time, the technique is going to be posing the question to yourself and seeing whether or not you can explain it. I would elaborate on this a little bit. I would say that the technique you use to test your memory should be a good fit for what you actually want to be able to do with the information. So for example, this happens— comes up a lot in the context of mathematics. Students will learn a particular formula to solve a particular type of problem, and they learn it in the context of a word problem that's to do with football players, for example. And then on the test, the same principle is tested, They need to use the same formula, but now it's not football players. Now it's automobiles or something else. And they fail to recognize the information. This is a different type of recognition, and it's actually much more difficult. So memory tends to cling to the examples that we initially encountered. So you need to think about, what am I actually wanting to do with this information? Do I need to be able to just describe it to others? what we talked about as being more difficult than just recognizing it. Or do I need to be able to recognize it in new guises? That's still more difficult. So take the problem that was about football and take the problem that was about automobiles. Take those 2 problems that look different on the surface and then describe how are these actually similar. And Shankar, this actually follows the principle that you and I have been talking about before, which is That memory sort of follows thought. What you're getting yourself to do by comparing those problems is thinking about what they have in common. You're thinking about that deep structure that they share. And so that's going to make you better appreciate that deep structure and be able to remember it and recognize it later in new problems.

So much of what we've been talking about, I think, goes back to that idea of almost probing our minds to find the weaknesses, to find the broken links in the chain. And that is just so hard to do, isn't it? Because it's sort of constantly exposing us to the limits of our own knowledge, the limits of our own understanding. It's forcing us to do the difficult thing of doing the push-ups where you're trying to clap as you're doing the push-ups. I think I'm trying to intuit why it is so many of us not only have bad memories, but why it's so difficult to fix those bad memories.

It's just effortful. And I think it's hard to face up to it. It's not fun to say, like, oh, there's a whole lot here that I don't know. There's a whole lot— let me make a point of probing what I don't know. Let me find my weaknesses.

That takes ego strength to sort of be brave in that way and look So even when we use very rigorous memory strategies, our memories may still fail us. And you have learned to use external aids to help your memory. I understand that, in fact, you might be a little obsessed with calendars and alarms. Can you tell me about your various practices involving calendars and alarms?

Sure.

Yeah, obsessed is probably fair. My prospective memory is not very good. I don't remember to do things. And so the way I deal with that is I've made a real habit of relying on my calendar. And if it's not on my calendar, the odds that I'm going to remember it are very, very close to zero. And I also make heavy use of alarms that are programmed in my phone. And in a typical day, I'll have 8 alarms or something like that going.

So you have something going off at 11:25 to tell you something's happening at 11:30, pay attention?

Yeah. I mean, again, this is sort of facing up to weakness. I just live too much in my head and I'm not aware enough of the world around me. So I need something to sort of snap me out of it.

I understand that this habit of relying on external memory saved the day for you at one point a few years ago. Tell me that story. Yeah.

This was 5 years ago maybe, and my wife had our 3 children out. They were all at an event that I was not at, and this was on a Sunday. So this is pretty unusual for me with, with 3 small children. And so I was really enjoying myself. I'm sort of puttering around the house and doing little chores as we do on Sunday. And then I start deciding I'm going to do a little work puttering. So I start answering email and so on. And then at some point, I get an email where I need to put something in my calendar. So I open my calendar and I still remember the feeling of opening my calendar and perceiving on that day a red blob. Red means important. And it was one of those things where like time slows down and I'm like, that can't be right. And I go and look at what it is and I realize I have an airplane I'm supposed to be on in 7 hours.

Oh my God.

And the airplane— I was supposed to go to a city in the Midwest, and I was supposed to give a talk the next day. I wasn't packed. I had absolutely no idea what the talk was supposed to be that I was supposed to give. The airport's about half an hour away.

Oh my God.

So sort of for my life, I threw things in a suitcase, and it all ended up fine. But that was a very close call.

Daniel Willingham is a psychologist at the University of Virginia. He's the author of the book Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning Is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy. Dan, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero today is listener and Hidden Brain supporter Robin Ross. Robin tells us that the unsung hero stories are one of her favorite parts of the show. She was particularly moved by the story of a woman named Jennifer whose unsung hero stopped a group of girls from bullying her in middle school. Robin writes, your unsung hero stories reassure me that there is hope for us. Acts of kindness can have an enormously positive impact, and we should all try to be someone's unsung hero. We're so glad you enjoy these stories, Robin, and we really appreciate your support. If you liked today's episode, and if you'd like to join Robin in helping us make more Hidden Brain stories, please go to support.hiddenbrain.org. That site again is support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

J.G. Haygie, A.C. Hacey, McRue, Tawoo, Haku, Huru, Trimican, John Exford, Carrigan, Bush.

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