Making Lasting Memories

Motivation

This is all about intention. You have a reason to want to remember this thing you just learned or experienced. You must now do something intentionally to help you remember. If this is something you are trying to learn, writing it down or visualizing the concept qualifies as taking intentional action to remember it. If this is something you’re able to experience, giving it your FULL attention and recognizing the small sensory details as you experience them is great intention in the moment.

Emotion

When emotion gets involved in the creation of a memory, you are bringing in the amygdala to join the cerebellum and prefrontal cortex on the memory making team. When this happens, an arousal is linked to the information, making it a stronger memory. Later in life you might find that being in a similar mood as the one that was associated to the moment you recorded will trigger that memory to pop back up (for good or for bad).

Locations & Associations

This principle is all about context- and is why certain places and things can make us feel nostalgic. The article I linked to states, “the more vivid the environment where the memory is created, the more associations you pair with the memory. The more associations you connect to the memory, the more encoded the information is.” That’s probably why Walt Disney World is such a great place to make and recall childhood memories.

Undisturbed Processing

This one right here is why what I do is important to helping you make everlasting memories. I’ve written before about the many problems of wearing both the parent and photographer hat. It’s hard because we are forcing ourselves to multi-task, and the brain cannot multi-task. This means if we are thinking about composing and what might happen next to be ready to make the perfect picture- even if we put down the camera for a minute or two to be in the experience- we aren’t allowing our brains to fully process the experience before we push it onto the next thing. It will not be saved as a long term memory. Even more so, we may not be allowing our children to fully process the memory either because our coming and going from the experience breaks their ability to process it as well.

Patterns & Meaning

These are those fancy techniques that use patterns to create meaning to something we may not be fully motivated to remember. Jim Kwik has a podcast called Kwik Brain that goes over a bunch of these helpful techniques and how to implement them in your daily life to memorize new names, process information for work or school, and to even read faster and comprehend more.

Conditioning to Familiarity

This is one of the hardest and most time-consuming principles to making a long term memory because it requires continuous repetition over a long period of time to work. It’s how many of us eventually learn the names of the people we see on a regular basis, even if there isn’t a motivating factor to remember their names. Or how we eventually learn those annoying jingles that we hear on the radio every morning we drive to work. Back to the article, “the more positive effects associated with the memory or the information, the more likely you are to keep it around. The more you keep it around, the more conditioned it will become internally.”

Incarnational Learning

This is doing something with the information to process it- moving it from head to hands. Most of us are kinesthetic learners, we learn by doing. It creates meaning, emotion, and tangible associations- making use of three other principles we’ve discussed.