Remember Everything

Ah yes, the past ... what a wonderfully vague concept made available by our human brain.

If you're like most other people on this planet, you have long-term memory. This gives you the ability to recall events, stories, plots, and the like, since you were around 4 or 5 years old till the present day. This is useful, since it let's you learn from prior experiences, and hence was selected for evolutionarily.

Don't be fooled, however, into thinking that your long-term memory acts like a tape drive with the record button pushed, recording the input from your five senses continuously since you started to remember things. That's way too demanding on your little gray-goop-matter computer. Let's see how much space I would need to store my long-term memory's information if that were indeed the case:

Given that the DivX file format is approximately 10MB/sec for lossy-compressed-yet-good-quality video, let's double that and say that we can encode human vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste at decent quality for about 20MB/sec. That gives us:

20 x 1048576 x 60 x 24 x 365 x 23 = 253,520,510,976,000 bytes, or roughly 250 TB of data over the last 23 years of my life. Nope. My brain is not that awesome.

So what's happening then?

That is a question that probably won't be answered in our lifetimes. In fact we have such a weak understanding of how memory is actually encoded in our brains that it's really not worth hypothesizing about.

You probably have heard, however, that emotions affect the quality of the memory of a certain event. You probably have witnessed this effect yourself. Do you remember the first time you had sex? Of course you do ... you were excited, nervous, happy, scared and all sorts of other emotions. You will probably never lose that memory for a long, long time.

It turns out emotions and long-term memory seem to be processed by the same region in the brain: the Limbic System. This is no coincidence. It's evolutionarily valuable to be able to remember occasions and events that occurred during high levels of emotional arousal, such as while being "angry" or "sad" or "happy". Generally speaking, the stronger the emotion at the time of the event, the stronger that event will be "remembered" or encoded in the brain's long-term storage. Events that don't carry much emotion are generally considered as "unimportant" by the Limbic System, and hence are not remembered as well. This process allows for "efficient" storage of memories.

It is generally accepted that most animal species have a limbic system, yet few have a powerful Neo-cortex like us humans, supporting the fact that emotionally-linked-long-term memory is more essential to survival than complex problem-solving or linguistic skills.

Now the juicy part.

You and I can recognize these facts about the human brain, and exploit them. This is a very small view-port into the massive world of NLP:

If you want to remember an event better, generate a lot of emotion during the event.

I realize that sentence is easier said than done, though it is quite doable, and you should try it. Next time you need to remember a phone number, recall a very emotional event during the act of memorizing the phone number. Associate that emotional event with the number as best as you can. If you can't recall any specific emotional event, just make one up. Strange? Very, yet still practical.

Let's consider a simple example.

Suppose I tell you to remember this 7 digit number: 134-9910. Now think of something that was emotionally charged for you in the past, and work that number somehow into your memory's "plot". It can be something totally crazy, like you can imagine these digits as being the serial number to the coffin your grandmother laid in that day you went to her funeral. Go back to that day, and really feel what you felt at the time. The sadness, the uncertainty, the etc. See what you saw at the time, and try to recall the smells and other aspects of that past environment.

If none of your emotionally charged past events come to mind, make up a plot. Close your eyes and imagine you are sitting next to the TV with a lottery ticket, when you realize, that your number is being built up ... first comes the 1, then the 3 ... then the 4 ... then the 9 ... oh my fucking god, can this really be it?? Another 9 shows up on the screen ... hooolllyyy shit. A 1 follows that nine, and by now you freaking out ... then bam! the number 0 is the final digit. What an emotional roller-coaster.

Generally speaking, the memory "storage" will be stronger the stronger the emotions were while remembering/imagining the intense event.

It's important to note that these kinds of NLP techniques have been met with various amounts of criticism, and many times rightfully so. It's more important, however, to realize that stepping outside the box and using strange techniques for solving life's problems might be quite beneficial to you and me, so this is at least worth a try before being rejected.


Until next time,
--Shafik