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Episode: You 2.0: Remember More, Forget Less

Author: Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam
Duration: 00:53:32

Episode Shownotes

It happens to the best of us — we blank on someone's name, or forget an important meeting, or bomb a test we thought we'd ace. In this week's installment of our You 2.0 series, we talk to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham about the mysteries of memory: how it works,

why it fails us, and how to build memories that stick. For more of our You 2.0 series, listen to our episode on how to say no.

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_05
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.

00:00:16 Speaker_05
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.

00:00:31 Speaker_05
His core themes of shrinking government and cutting spending were popular with many Republican voters.

00:00:37 Speaker_01
Tonight, we are here in the great state of Michigan for a debate that will focus almost exclusively on the economy.

00:00:44 Speaker_05
On November 9th, Rick Perry appeared on stage in Rochester, Michigan, along with seven fellow candidates. It was a live televised debate watched by millions.

00:00:56 Speaker_03
But the fact of the matter is, we better have a plan in place that Americans can get their hands around.

00:01:01 Speaker_05
And that's the reason my flat tax is the only one... 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.

00:01:13 Speaker_05
Under his leadership, he vowed, entire departments would disappear.

00:01:18 Speaker_03
And I will tell you, It's three 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?

00:01:36 Speaker_03
The third agency of government, I would do away with the education, the... Commerce. Commerce, and let's see. I can't. The third one, I can't. Sorry. Oops.

00:01:55 Speaker_05
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.

00:02:13 Speaker_05
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.

00:02:50 Speaker_05
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.

00:03:04 Speaker_05
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.

00:03:20 Speaker_05
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.

00:03:32 Speaker_05
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?

00:03:42 Speaker_09
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.

00:03:54 Speaker_05
And did you, I'm assuming you must have gone and talked to the professor and tried to make your case that students are want to do.

00:04:00 Speaker_09
I did. And I said exactly what today my students say to me, I said, you know, I'm very confused. You know, I'm certain that I knew this content very well. And yet I did very poorly on your test.

00:04:11 Speaker_09
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.

00:04:24 Speaker_09
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.

00:04:36 Speaker_09
Okay, 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.

00:04:47 Speaker_09
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.

00:05:01 Speaker_05
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?

00:05:14 Speaker_09
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.

00:05:27 Speaker_09
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.

00:05:35 Speaker_05
I want to bring up another incident that I think reveals a different way in which our memories can fail us.

00:05:41 Speaker_05
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.

00:05:51 Speaker_09
Yeah, my advisor was a brilliant psychologist. He actually was a winner of the National Medal of Science, but he was rather forbidding.

00:06:01 Speaker_09
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.

00:06:15 Speaker_09
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.

00:06:27 Speaker_09
I was happily, you know, reading or I don't know what in the world I was doing. But the lab meeting was happening 10 feet away from me, and I expect they were saying, you know, where's Willingham? I just had no idea.

00:06:41 Speaker_09
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.

00:06:52 Speaker_05
I almost hesitate to ask, did you hear from your advisor about it?

00:06:56 Speaker_09
Yes, I went to talk to him about it. 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.

00:07:09 Speaker_09
And he did say like, oh, it's okay, it happens to all of us, but it was extremely uncomfortable, yeah.

00:07:14 Speaker_05
Now, lots of us feel that some memories are immune from lapses. When we learn something well, we feel, OK, I've got this. In your first year of teaching, Dan, you were explaining a basic concept in statistics to a class of students.

00:07:29 Speaker_05
What were you trying to teach? And tell me what happened.

00:07:32 Speaker_09
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.

00:07:46 Speaker_09
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

00:08:02 Speaker_09
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.

00:08:17 Speaker_09
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.

00:08:32 Speaker_05
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.

00:08:48 Speaker_05
I want you to listen to this news report from 2021.

00:08:52 Speaker_02
San Francisco resident Stephan Thomas lost the key to unlock his digital wallet that holds 7,000 bitcoins. That translates to a whopping 220 million dollars.

00:09:03 Speaker_02
The correct password is locked in a hard drive that gives users 10 guesses before it locks forever. Thomas has only two more tries to gain access to his fortune.

00:09:14 Speaker_05
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.

00:09:25 Speaker_09
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.

00:09:38 Speaker_09
But what is startling is his confidence that he was going to remember this. Our judgment of our memory is often faulty.

00:09:53 Speaker_05
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?

00:10:11 Speaker_05
When we come back, counterintuitive truths about how memory works. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

00:10:32 Speaker_05
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.

00:10:45 Speaker_05
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.

00:10:56 Speaker_05
Does our wanting to remember something help us to remember it? It is amazing.

00:11:02 Speaker_09
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?

00:11:17 Speaker_09
And of course, we know we very often don't. 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.

00:11:28 Speaker_06
Right.

00:11:28 Speaker_09
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.

00:11:40 Speaker_09
And it has no impact on whether or not they eventually remember something.

00:11:47 Speaker_05
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.

00:12:00 Speaker_05
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.

00:12:11 Speaker_05
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?

00:12:20 Speaker_09
This is speculation, of course, but it seems to make a certain amount of evolutionary sense that this would not be a great way to set up a brain, because our judgment in the moment may not be very good.

00:12:35 Speaker_09
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,

00:12:47 Speaker_09
it's probably something you're gonna have to think about again, and so that increases the probability that it's gonna end up in the memory system.

00:12:56 Speaker_05
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.

00:13:14 Speaker_09
That's exactly it. And 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.

00:13:25 Speaker_09
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.

00:13:36 Speaker_09
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.

00:13:48 Speaker_05
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.

00:14:00 Speaker_05
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?

00:14:13 Speaker_09
Yeah, because that confidence is coming from familiarity, and familiarity is not exactly the same type of memory that you usually want. So familiarity is the sense that I have encountered this before, and you can make that judgment very rapidly.

00:14:34 Speaker_09
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.

00:14:48 Speaker_09
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 memory cues. to try to help you get more information about who this person is and place them.

00:15:03 Speaker_09
So we're used to this idea that there is 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.

00:15:19 Speaker_09
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.

00:15:30 Speaker_09
And so as you're preparing for that speech, all you've done is by reading it over and over and over again,

00:15:37 Speaker_09
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.

00:15:55 Speaker_05
What is the alternative strategy to reading a speech 20 times and feeling confident that we have memorized it?

00:16:01 Speaker_09
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.

00:16:12 Speaker_09
So you need to practice giving the speech with only occasional reference to your notes. And the thing about that of course, is that's going to be harder and it's going to feel like you're failing a lot more frequently.

00:16:25 Speaker_09
Uh, but this is what you actually need to do. And this is, that's, what's going to be best for memory.

00:16:30 Speaker_05
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.

00:16:41 Speaker_05
Partly what we're doing is we're reassuring ourselves that we know the material.

00:16:47 Speaker_05
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.

00:16:57 Speaker_05
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.

00:17:08 Speaker_09
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.

00:17:16 Speaker_09
It sounds very obvious when you've explicated it the way you have, but even though it sounds obvious when you say it, it's something that most people don't do.

00:17:25 Speaker_05
I remember talking to Angela Duckworth many years ago after she wrote her book on grit, and one of her studies was looking at spelling bee champions.

00:17:36 Speaker_05
And the thing that she found was that spelling bee champions, you know, obviously put in a lot of time and preparation, but they also did what she called deliberate practice.

00:17:45 Speaker_05
And 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.

00:17:57 Speaker_05
And of course, that has to be very unpleasant and difficult to do.

00:18:01 Speaker_09
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, okay, this particular passage of this piece of music I'm trying to learn, this is what I'm really having difficulty with.

00:18:20 Speaker_09
And in addition, the other aspect of deliberate practice that's really important is thinking of strategies to overcome this difficulty, being ready to be creative and try different things and experiment to see how you can overcome the problem.

00:18:39 Speaker_05
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 what we know.

00:18:52 Speaker_05
Can you talk about this, that we imagine we know things, but we often underestimate our capacity to forget them?

00:19:00 Speaker_09
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.

00:19:10 Speaker_09
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.

00:19:24 Speaker_09
And it's, it's something that people have no familiarity with at all. It'll be like English to a Swahili translation of vocabulary or something. And they'll say, okay, well, you've studied these 20 words. You're getting about 80% correct.

00:19:36 Speaker_09
I want you to go home, come back in two 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, I'm getting 80%. I guess I'll probably get 80% again.

00:19:49 Speaker_09
They just completely discount that forgetting will happen in those two weeks. And in my experience with my students, once you point this out and explain it, it's not difficult for them to understand.

00:20:00 Speaker_09
But people just don't think about it if you don't point it out.

00:20:10 Speaker_05
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?

00:20:21 Speaker_09
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 working with flashcards or something with our English Swahili translation.

00:20:35 Speaker_09
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?

00:20:48 Speaker_09
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.

00:20:56 Speaker_05
So, you spend many years studying how memory works and studying how to fix lapses in memory. And then you say, okay, let me go out and teach my students how to learn better, how to be better students.

00:21:09 Speaker_05
And of course, you're an educator, so it's the perfect setting because students want to learn and remember the things that they have learned. Tell me about your efforts to teach these ideas to your students.

00:21:19 Speaker_05
Did they master your insights and start to remember things better?

00:21:23 Speaker_09
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.

00:21:35 Speaker_09
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. So on. And so I felt like I was getting pretty good at diagnosing what was going on with each individual student.

00:21:47 Speaker_09
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.

00:22:00 Speaker_09
So after about a year of that, I started following up with those students and saying, so we had this conversation. Tell me, you know, did you do what, what I suggested you do? And I found a very common response was I tried it and it just felt stupid.

00:22:17 Speaker_09
It just didn't feel like it was effective at all. And so I stopped doing it.

00:22:23 Speaker_05
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.

00:22:32 Speaker_09
That's exactly right.

00:22:33 Speaker_09
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 gonna need to do in school.

00:22:48 Speaker_09
And they're certainly not taught about how their memory works. And yet they all seem to use the same strategies for memorization.

00:22:57 Speaker_09
And the reason is they all gravitate towards strategies that feel effective in the moment and that also aren't that difficult.

00:23:11 Speaker_05
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.

00:23:25 Speaker_05
Like a spring reverting to its old shape, we revert to our easy, intuitive assumptions, even though those assumptions are often wrong.

00:23:33 Speaker_05
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 Vedant. This is Hidden Brain.

00:23:59 Speaker_05
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.

00:24:16 Speaker_05
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.

00:24:27 Speaker_05
You draw an analogy with physical exercise to help people understand your point about the kind of effort that's necessary to create lasting memories. What's the connection between doing push-ups and having a better memory?

00:24:40 Speaker_09
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 pushups. So you go and visit them one time and see them training and you find them doing pushups on their knees.

00:24:54 Speaker_09
And you say, why in the world do you, like, if you want to do a lot of regular pushups, you should do regular pushups.

00:25:00 Speaker_09
In fact, instead of regular pushups, you should do really difficult pushups, like the ones where you launch yourself off the floor and clap.

00:25:07 Speaker_09
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 pushups. And the whole point here is I'm trying to do a lot of pushups, right?

00:25:16 Speaker_09
So, but look, when I do pushups 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 pushups on their knees.

00:25:30 Speaker_09
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.

00:25:41 Speaker_09
But the right type of challenge is going to bring you the benefit in the long run.

00:25:47 Speaker_05
So, let's hear about some of the mental equivalents of doing push-ups that, you know, propel you off the floor long enough to clap.

00:25:54 Speaker_05
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 a memory retention strategy?

00:26:08 Speaker_09
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.

00:26:26 Speaker_09
So that when you remember part of it, that's going to help dredge up the rest of it. And then also connecting it to things that you already know something about.

00:26:37 Speaker_09
That's also helpful, sort of integrating it into sort of the broader memory web is going to be really helpful.

00:26:45 Speaker_09
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.

00:26:56 Speaker_09
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.

00:27:06 Speaker_09
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.

00:27:22 Speaker_05
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.

00:27:35 Speaker_05
Because it's actually causing me now to say, how can I connect the ideas myself? And do I have sort of a cohesive picture of the whole idea, the meaning of the idea, that's in that section?

00:27:48 Speaker_09
That's absolutely right, and I'll elaborate on what you just said in two ways.

00:27:52 Speaker_09
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.

00:28:07 Speaker_09
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?

00:28:18 Speaker_09
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.

00:28:36 Speaker_09
case, 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 what this means. Let me see if I can create a summary of this section.

00:28:50 Speaker_09
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.

00:29:04 Speaker_09
That's going to be great for memory.

00:29:07 Speaker_05
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 memories.

00:29:18 Speaker_05
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?

00:29:28 Speaker_09
Yeah, this was actually, I observed this lesson, so this was a lesson for middle elementary students, probably fourth grade, on the Underground Railroad.

00:29:38 Speaker_09
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

00:29:50 Speaker_09
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.

00:30:06 Speaker_09
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.

00:30:17 Speaker_09
And they probably spent about 20 or 30 minutes thinking about measuring flour, cutting shortening, and so on. So, what I tell teachers is, listen, students don't remember what they want to remember.

00:30:31 Speaker_09
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.

00:30:42 Speaker_05
How do you think the lesson plan should have been changed to get a better outcome?

00:30:46 Speaker_09
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.

00:31:04 Speaker_09
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?

00:31:13 Speaker_09
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.

00:31:25 Speaker_05
You talk about another technique called elaborative interrogation. What is this, Dan, and how does it work?

00:31:32 Speaker_09
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.

00:31:44 Speaker_09
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 pose questions based on that little preview that you do.

00:32:02 Speaker_09
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?

00:32:18 Speaker_05
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.

00:32:24 Speaker_05
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 it.

00:32:38 Speaker_05
That's the way you actually remember the material, not just simply listening to it.

00:32:42 Speaker_09
That's absolutely right. And these little tricks, I think, help because, again, one of the things that it's hard to do is sort of tell yourself, OK, now I'm really going to think deeply about this. You need something more concrete.

00:32:55 Speaker_09
So the technique like, well, you know, look at the subheadings and try and generate some questions based on that.

00:33:01 Speaker_09
That gives the mind something to work with where you see what the path forward is instead of just telling people, well, really think about what it means.

00:33:15 Speaker_05
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.

00:33:24 Speaker_09
Yes, stories are very effective because stories have connections. Stories have causality in them, right?

00:33:33 Speaker_09
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.

00:33:54 Speaker_05
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?

00:34:04 Speaker_09
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.

00:34:13 Speaker_09
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.

00:34:25 Speaker_09
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.

00:34:37 Speaker_05
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.

00:34:47 Speaker_05
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 Lego building, if you will, with all the pieces sort of connected to one another.

00:35:00 Speaker_05
So to identify, when you're asked to identify any individual piece, you have a sense of where it sits in the overall scheme.

00:35:08 Speaker_09
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?

00:35:21 Speaker_09
No one ever says, oh, I don't know. Like I didn't study it. You know, I just saw it. I can't remember it. No, the memory just comes for free when you're engaged with a story.

00:35:33 Speaker_09
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 I say salt. That makes you think of pepper.

00:35:49 Speaker_09
These two things are connected in memory. So, in a story, everything is connected to something else.

00:35:57 Speaker_09
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.

00:36:08 Speaker_09
You just keep tugging, and it keeps coming out, and it's easy to remember.

00:36:14 Speaker_05
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?

00:36:26 Speaker_09
Conflict is the way it's usually described in story structure. So in Star Wars, you know, is Luke going to be able to save civilization by destroying the Death Star? He needs something to fight against. So it's going to be Darth Vader.

00:36:44 Speaker_08
With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy. I'll never join you.

00:36:54 Speaker_09
And then, again, when you're thinking about story structure, you're usually thinking about multiple pieces. So the other aspect, in addition to conflict, is complication.

00:37:04 Speaker_09
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 sub-problem that you have to figure out.

00:37:17 Speaker_09
And again, that makes for very nice connections that helps you sort of keep it all organized in your mind and easier to remember.

00:37:25 Speaker_05
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.

00:37:38 Speaker_09
Absolutely. And again, if there are people in what you're trying to remember, that's going to be really helpful. Individual personalities help. Distinctiveness helps memory.

00:37:50 Speaker_09
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.

00:38:05 Speaker_09
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.

00:38:17 Speaker_09
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.

00:38:29 Speaker_09
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.

00:38:38 Speaker_05
And I'm thinking about plays or movies. 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.

00:38:50 Speaker_05
And Hamilton, the play, probably did more for, you know, U.S. history and American history and people, students understanding American history than, you know, countless history classes.

00:39:04 Speaker_09
Yes, those were beautiful examples of character-driven stories.

00:39:22 Speaker_05
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.

00:39:35 Speaker_05
There's no story to connect all the names together. What do we do?

00:39:40 Speaker_09
The go-to method here is a mnemonic, and the 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.

00:39:56 Speaker_05
Have you done this? Are there mnemonics that you still remember from your childhood?

00:40:01 Speaker_09
Absolutely. In junior year of high school, 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.

00:40:15 Speaker_05
I'm going to put you on the spot here, Dan. Let's give it a go.

00:40:19 Speaker_09
And 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 Wah-Jamah.

00:40:43 Speaker_09
So Wah is Washington, Adams, Jamah, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Adams, JV, Jackson, Van Buren. And then occasionally you have to remember some things. So like Trumican is Truman, and then Ike for Eisenhower, and then it ends Ken for Kennedy.

00:41:00 Speaker_09
So there are little bits in there we have to do some interpretation, but of course that's not hard.

00:41:06 Speaker_09
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 present at that point? Needless to say, you have to be kind of quiet when you do it.

00:41:20 Speaker_09
Socially, it's a little awkward.

00:41:23 Speaker_05
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.

00:41:43 Speaker_05
What is the technique that you suggest, Dan?

00:41:46 Speaker_09
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

00:42:03 Speaker_09
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.

00:42:11 Speaker_09
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.

00:42:29 Speaker_09
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.

00:42:45 Speaker_09
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?

00:42:59 Speaker_09
That's 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.

00:43:10 Speaker_09
So take the problem that was about football and take the problem that was about automobiles. Take those two problems that look different on the surface and then describe, how are these actually similar?

00:43:22 Speaker_09
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.

00:43:36 Speaker_09
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.

00:43:55 Speaker_05
You know, 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?

00:44:08 Speaker_05
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, you know, the push-ups where you're trying to clap as you're doing the push-ups.

00:44:20 Speaker_05
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.

00:44:30 Speaker_09
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.

00:44:43 Speaker_09
That takes, you know, ego strength to sort of be brave in that way and look at what we don't know.

00:44:54 Speaker_05
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.

00:45:11 Speaker_05
Can you tell me about your various practices involving calendars and alarms?

00:45:15 Speaker_09
Yeah, I'm obsessed is probably fair. My perspective 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.

00:45:30 Speaker_09
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. In a typical day, I'll have eight alarms or something like that going.

00:45:46 Speaker_05
So you have something going off at 11.25 to tell you something's happening at 11.30, pay attention?

00:45:53 Speaker_09
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, and so I need something to sort of snap me out of it.

00:46:05 Speaker_05
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, Dan.

00:46:13 Speaker_09
This was five years ago, maybe, and my wife had our three children out. They were all at an event that I was not at. This was on a Sunday, so this was pretty unusual for me with three small children. And so I was really enjoying myself.

00:46:30 Speaker_09
I'm sort of puttering around the house and doing little chores as we do on Sunday. And then I start to say, I'm going to do a little work puttering. So I start answering email and so on.

00:46:40 Speaker_09
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 Bread means important.

00:46:57 Speaker_09
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 realized I have an airplane I'm supposed to be on in 75 minutes.

00:47:08 Speaker_05
Oh my God.

00:47:08 Speaker_09
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.

00:47:21 Speaker_09
The airport's about a half an hour away.

00:47:23 Speaker_05
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 while 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.

00:47:48 Speaker_05
Thank you Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

00:48:11 Speaker_05
I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. We end today with a story from our sister show, My Unsung Hero. This My Unsung Hero segment is brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. Our story comes from Sabrina Kronk.

00:48:31 Speaker_05
20 years ago, Sabrina was a newly single mother living near Nashville. Things were tough financially, but she just landed a new job and life was looking up.

00:48:40 Speaker_05
That is, until one fall morning when she got into her car to take her daughter to daycare and the car wouldn't start.

00:48:47 Speaker_00
I had a Jeep Grand Cherokee that had over 250,000 miles and I walked out to my car, put my three and a half year old daughter in her car seat, jumped in the front seat and put the keys in the ignition.

00:49:04 Speaker_00
tried to turn the keys and immediately heard this clicking noise. And, you know, my heart just sunk. I thought, what is wrong now? I had had my car in the shop multiple times over the past couple of weeks and months.

00:49:21 Speaker_00
Finances were just so limited at that point. And I'd already been pouring a lot of money into the car.

00:49:30 Speaker_00
The car eventually rumbled to a start and I knew I had to drive straight to the service center at the car dealership and not stop anywhere else so I could get there in one piece and hopefully it wouldn't break down on the side of the road.

00:49:46 Speaker_00
So we drove straight to the dealership, pulled into the service bay and the service technicians started taking out my daughter's car seat, and putting it in the courtesy car that would drive us to her daycare and work.

00:50:03 Speaker_00
And I realized they had done it so many times that it was like we had our own personal pit crew. You know, you pull in and they start taking care of things without even being told what to do. They just knew to transfer everything.

00:50:15 Speaker_00
They would even shuttle us to the front of the line. Like they didn't want her to have to wait or me to have to wait. Drove me to her daycare and then I walked to work, which wasn't far.

00:50:28 Speaker_00
And so at the end of the day, they called me, told me the courtesy car was on the way and that it would be ready when I got there that afternoon to pick up. So I'll walk up to the cashier after we arrived. And she told me there was no charge.

00:50:44 Speaker_00
They had miraculously found the part I needed at no cost. And I said, could you check that? Like, what is the labor cost going to be today? And she said that the service technicians had donated their labor.

00:50:59 Speaker_00
And I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. So I asked her if she would please check with the manager. I just wanted to make sure. And he came over to me and just told me just to not worry about it. Everything was taken care of.

00:51:15 Speaker_00
Just to focus on taking care of my daughter. I could barely speak. Tears filled my eyes. And he ushered me quickly in my car and then kind of gave me two taps on the top of the car, like, let's go. I'll just never forget that kindness and generosity.

00:51:34 Speaker_00
I mean, in them doing that, it made it possible for us to survive financially the rest of the month. Whenever I think about that time in my life, I think about not only that crew, but all the other people that helped us.

00:51:51 Speaker_00
Just having that kind of kindness in a moment where you're like, what now? What else do I have to deal with? They say when you're at the end of your lifeline, you know, tie a piece of string on it and hang on. Well, they allowed me to do that that day.

00:52:13 Speaker_05
Sabrina Cronk of Nashville, Tennessee. Her daughter, Katie, is now an adult. This segment of My Unsung Hero was brought to you by T-Mobile for Business. Next week, we conclude this year's U2.0 series with a look at cynicism.

00:52:39 Speaker_04
So it's almost as though if social connection is medicine, it doesn't work for cynics. It's almost as though they have, you know, they're resistant to this medication that helps the rest of us.

00:52:53 Speaker_05
how cynicism harms us, and how to resist its pull. That's next week in the final episode of our series. If you missed any part of today's show or any of our U2.0 episodes, you can find them in this podcast feed or at hiddenbrain.org.

00:53:10 Speaker_05
Today's episode is the one titled U2.0, Remember More, Forget Less. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.