Remember anything

For thousands of years our ancestors sat around the campfire telling stories. Everything was recited from memory, so stories evolved with each telling, as details were left out, added, or changed. Some of these stories are likely still with us today – studies have traced folk tales back as far as the Bronze age – however the vast majority of stories would have been forgotten. Stories face evolutionary pressure much like species of plants and animals do, except their ecosystem is all in our heads: when the last person who remembers a story forgets it, the story ceases to exist. Contemporary hunter-gatherers have mostly functional conversations during the day, but at night they sit around the campfire and tell stories. If you have useful information for me that’s immediately applicable, you can just tell me in the moment. However what if you want to impart some hard-won advice that might not be useful until some time in the future? If we’re in the middle of a hunt, it’s not the right time: I won’t afford you the attention. However later around the campfire when the work is done, I’m more relaxed and willing to be entertained. If I don’t remember the story you told me, it’s useless: I can’t recall the information later when it becomes useful, and I can’t pass it on.

Now we no longer need to retain information in memory to recall it or pass it on. The invention of writing, printing, and the computer have made it increasingly cheaper to remember. Modern notetaking tools give us the ability to remember anything, and access it from anywhere, for essentially free. We’re never far away from a computer or phone, and taking notes digitally makes them searchable later. Of course we still forget to look at our notes, and or what keywords we filed them under. We can review notes with spaced repetition – reviewing flash cards at regular intervals – which improves memory by 82%. Pair this with active recall – testing if you can answer from scratch – which grants 45% better understanding. There are also ‘memory palaces’ – imagining a familiar building and storing information in each room by telling yourself a story about them – a technique used by 9/10 contestants in the World Memory Championships. Adding narrative in this way makes information 6 to 7 times more likely to be retained, because it creates anchor points in memory to refer back to later.

Now we can remember anything, should we? Deciding to deliberately remember something is Kahneman’s System 2 (conscious brain) dictating to System 1 (unconscious brain) what’s important. Our conscious brain is what we think of as “us”, but 98% of our thinking happens unconsciously. System 2 is deliberate, analytical and unemotional. That doesn’t automatically mean rational. What economists call ‘irrational’ behaviors or ‘biases’ are memes that helped us survive for 10,000 years. As per the Lindy Effect they’re likely to prevail 10,000 more. Not all goals are equally valid or useful. If you memorize 17,500 species of butterfly, it won’t do much for you. Memory champions are rarely millionaires. Our brains could have evolved more storage, but they didn’t. If anything we’re deevolving that functionality now our phones can remember for us. If your brain keeps forgetting something, or you’re procrastinating learning it, maybe that’s telling you it’s not worth remembering. Perhaps a wiser method is to use memory as a filter system, as director Taika Waititi does, and throw away your first draft: trust your brain to remember the good parts.

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