Category: Memory

Mind pops are random words or images that suddenly pop into your head for no reason — like a flashback.

You’re walking down the street, just like any other day, when suddenly a memory pops into your head from years ago.

It’s about a person you haven’t thought of for years.

Just for a moment you’re transported back to a time and place you thought was long-forgotten.

In a flash, though, the memory has vanished as quickly as it appeared.

This experience has been dubbed a ‘mind pop’ and sometimes it is prompted by nothing your conscious mind is aware of.

Weirder mind pops

There is, perhaps, an even weirder type of mind pop.

This is when all you get is a word or an image which seems to have no connection to anything at all.

Like suddenly thinking of the word ‘orange’ or getting the image of a cheese grater.

They seem weirder because they feel unconnected to any past experience, place or person—a thought without any autobiographical context.

Not everyone has these experiences, but many do.

When psychologists have recorded these involuntary memories, they find that, on average, people have about one a day.

They are most likely to occur during routine, habitual activities, like walking down the street, brushing your teeth or getting dressed (Kvavilashvili & Mandler, 2004).

They are also more likely to come when your attention is roaming and diffused.

Mind pops can be traced

Some of these mind pops can even be traced back to their causes.

Here is one psychologist (L.K.) describing some mental detective work:

“…while throwing a used bag in a dust bin the word “Acapulco” popped up and since L.K. had no idea what it was and where she might have come across the word she turned to a member of family for help. To her surprise, it was pointed out to her that Acapulco was mentioned on the TV news some 45 minutes ago.”

This ability to trace a mind pop back to its source wasn’t an isolated case.

When they surveyed people, Kvavilashvili and Mandler found that the words and images that seemed to pop up randomly, didn’t actually come from nowhere.

Sometimes it was an associative mind pop, like being reminded about Christmas and later having the words ‘Jingle Bells’ pop into your head.

Or, it could be a sound-a-like, for example having the image of a sandy beach appear after you see a banana (Bahamas sounds like bananas).

The fact that many mind pops could not be traced back to their source is probably the result of how much of our processing is carried out unconsciously.

The fascinating thing was that many of these mind pops occurred weeks or months after exposure to the original trigger.

This suggests that these words, images and ideas can lie in wait for a considerable period.

Some even think that experiencing mind pops could be associated with creativity as these apparently random associations can help to solve creative problems.

Mind pops are another hint that we are recording more information than we know.

Fortunately, our minds mostly do a good job of suppressing random thoughts and images, as they can be extremely distracting.

So next time you have a mind pop, remember that, however weird, it has probably been triggered by something you’ve seen, heard or thought about recently, even if you can’t remember what.

Of course, why we get these particular ones and not others is still a mystery.

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Effectively, the internet is taking over from human memory.

Using the internet to look up facts makes us more reliant on it in the future, research finds.

The more times people look up facts online, the less they prefer to rely on their own memories for even the simplest questions.

Psychologists have called this ‘cognitive offloading’.

Effectively, the internet is taking over from human memory.

Dr Benjamin Storm, the study’s first author, said:

“Memory is changing.

Our research shows that as we use the Internet to support and extend our memory we become more reliant on it.

Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don’t bother.

As more information becomes available via smartphones and other devices, we become progressively more reliant on it in our daily lives.”

For the study people were asked a series of challenging trivia questions.

One group was allowed to Google it while the other had to rely on their memory.

Later on both groups were given a series of easier questions to answer and both allowed to use Google if they preferred.

The results showed that those who used the internet before were more likely to use it again.

Remarkably, 30 percent of people who used the internet earlier failed to try and answer any of a series of relatively simple questions from memory.

They preferred to Google it.

Those who had relied on their memory before, though, were more likely to use their own memories again.

This could all be more ammunition for those claiming that the internet is making us stupid.

Professor Evan F. Risko, author of a review of the research on cognitive offloading (Risko & Gilbert, 2016), said:

“If you’re allowed to store some to-be-remembered information on a computer, chances are you won’t devote cognitive real estate to remembering it.

As a result, your ability to remember that information without the computer will likely be reduced.

There’s little doubt that these new technologies are affecting what we remember.”

Or, of course, you could argue it’s just the natural way of things: we use whatever tools work.

Have pencil and paper or calculators really made us that much more stupid?

Or did they ultimately allow us to do more?

The study was published in the journal Memory (Storm et al., 2016).

The doorway effect demonstrates that memory is easily disrupted by both our location and what we are doing.

When passing through doorways, our brains ‘file’ memories away, making it difficult to recall what we were doing, research finds.

It is as though doorways are unconsciously signalling: “That’s enough of that, now we’ll do something different.”

As a result, active memories are shunted out of consciousness.

If you have previously been blaming this on poor memory, then think again.

Professor Gabriel Radvansky, the study’s first author, explained:

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away.

Recalling the decision or activity that was made in a different room is difficult because it has been compartmentalized.”

For the research, people in the study navigated through a series of virtual rooms and doorways.

Objects in each room were used to test people’s memories.

The results clearly showed that passing through doorways was bad for people’s memory.

The doorway effect

The doorway effect shows how our memories are linked to the location we are in.

For example, if you return to your old school, all sorts of memories will flood back from your schooldays.

Often things you haven’t thought about for years, or even decades, will pop into your head.

The study also shows how changing both our physical and mental environment together disrupts memory.

By mental environment here, we mean whatever your plan was in one room.

For example, my plan now is to write this article here in my study.

If I go to make a cup of tea, I change my plan, from writing about this fascinating psychology study to filling the kettle.

At the same time, I am also going from the study to the kitchen.

The doorway effect suggests that when I leave the room, I will also forget what I was doing.

The study was published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (Radvansky et al., 2016).

How false memories from childhood could be implanted.

Fifty per cent of people are prone to believing false memories, research finds.

When totally fictitious (but plausible) events are suggested, around 50% of people then believe they have experienced them.

Examples included taking a hot air balloon ride as a child or causing havoc at a wedding when a child.

The conclusion comes from many ‘memory implantation’ studies that have been carried out over the years.

Typically, in the studies, people are asked to repeatedly imagine the fake events occurring.

They are then tested much later, once the memory has had a chance to settle in.

The result is that people find it very difficult to separate real events from false events.

Psychologists found that of the 50 percent who are susceptible:

• 30 percent of people remember fake events suggested to them. They will even go so far as to invent further details about the event that did not happen to them
• 23 percent showed some signs they remembered the fake events.

Dr Kimberley Wade, an author of the study, said:

“We know that many factors affect the creation of false beliefs and memories — such as asking a person to repeatedly imagine a fake event or to view photos to “jog” their memory.

But we don’t fully understand how all these factors interact.

Large-scale studies like our mega-analysis move us a little bit closer.

The finding that a large portion of people are prone to developing false beliefs is important.

We know from other research that distorted beliefs can influence people’s behaviours, intentions and attitudes.”

The study was published in the journal of Memory (Scoboria et al., 2016).

Fun facts about memory include that it does not decay, works nothing like a computer and that recall alone changes them.

“If we remembered everything we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.” ~William James

It’s often said that a person is the sum of their memories.

Your memory and recall is what makes you who you are.

Despite this, facts about memory are generally poorly understood, which is why many people say they have ‘bad memories’.

That’s partly because the analogies we have to hand—like that of computer memory—are not helpful.

The fact is that human memory is vastly more interesting and quirky than the memory residing in our laptops, tablets or phones.

Here is my 10-point guide to facts about memory (it is based on an excellent review chapter by the distinguished UCLA memory expert, Professor Robert A. Bjork).

1. Facts about memory: it does not decay

Everyone has experienced the frustration of not being able to recall a fact from memory.

It could be someone’s name, the French for ‘town hall’ or where the car is parked.

So it seems obvious that memories decay, like fruit going off.

But the research tends not to support this view.

Instead many researchers think that in fact memory has a limitless capacity.

Everything is stored in there but, without rehearsal, memories become harder to access.

This means it’s not the memory that’s ‘going off’ it’s the ability to retrieve it.

But what on earth is the point of a brain that remembers everything but can’t recall most of it?

Here’s what:

2. Forgetting helps you learn

The idea that forgetting helps you learn seems counter-intuitive, but think of it this way: imagine if you created a brain that could remember and recall everything.

When this amazing brain was trying to remember where it parked the car, it would immediately bring to mind all the car parks it had ever seen, then it would have to sort through the lot.

Obviously the only one that’s of interest is the most recent.

And this is generally true of most of our memories. Recent events are usually much more important than ones that happened a long time ago.

To make your super-brain quicker and more useful in the real world you’d have to build in some system for discounting old, useless info.

In fact, of course, we all have one of these super-brains with a discounting system: we call it ‘forgetting’.

That’s why forgetting helps you learn: as less relevant information becomes inaccessible, we are naturally left with the information that is most important to our daily survival.

3. ‘Lost’ memories can live again

There’s another side to the fact about memory not decaying.

That’s the idea that although memories may become less accessible, they can be revived.

Even things that you have long been unable to recall are still there, waiting to be woken.

Experiments have shown that even information that has long become inaccessible can still be revived.

Indeed it is then re-learned more quickly than new information.

This is like the fact about memory that you never forget how to ride a bike, but it doesn’t just apply to motor skills, it also applies to memory and recall.

4. Recalling memories alters them

Although it’s a fundamental of memory and recall, the idea that recall alters memories seems intuitively wrong.

How can recalling a memory change it?

Well, just by recalling a memory, it becomes stronger in comparison to other memories.

Let’s run this through an example.

Say you think back to one particular birthday from childhood and you recall getting a Lego spaceship.

Each time you recall that fact, the other things you got for your birthday that day become weaker in comparison.

The process of recall, then, is actually actively constructing the past, or at least the parts of your past that you can remember.

This is only the beginning though.

False memories can potentially be created by this process of falsely recalling the past.

Indeed, psychologists have experimentally implanted false memories.

This raises the fascinating idea that effectively we create ourselves by choosing which memories to recall.

5. Fact about memory: it is unstable

The fact that the simple act of recall changes memory means that it is relatively unstable.

But people tend to think that memory is relatively stable: we forget that we forgot and so we think we won’t forget in the future what we now know.

What this means is that students, in particular, vastly underestimate how much effort will be required to commit material to memory.

And they’re not the only ones.

This leads to…

6. The foresight bias

Everyone must have experienced this. You have an idea that is so great you think it’s impossible you’ll ever forget it.

So you don’t bother writing it down.

Within ten minutes you’ve forgotten it and it never comes back.

We see the same thing in the lab.

In one study by Koriat and Bjork (2005) people learned pairs of words like ‘light-lamp’, then are asked to estimate how likely it is they’ll be able to answer ‘lamp’ when later given the prompt ‘light’.

They are massively over-confident and the reason is this foresight bias.

When they get the word ‘light’ later all kinds of other things come to mind like ‘bulb’ or ‘shade’ and the correct answer isn’t nearly as easy to recall as they predicted.

7. When recall is easy, learning is low

We feel clever when we recall something instantly and stupid when it takes ages.

But in terms of learning, we should feel the exact reverse.

When something comes to mind quickly, i.e. we do no work to recall it, no learning occurs.

When we have to work hard to bring it to consciousness, something cool happens: we learn.

When people’s memories are tested, the more work they have done to construct, or re-construct, the target memory, the stronger the memory eventually becomes.

This is why proper learning techniques always involve testing, because just staring at the information isn’t good enough: learning needs effortful recall.

8. Learning depends heavily on context

Have you ever noticed that when you learn something in one context, like the classroom, it becomes difficult to recall when that context changes?

This is because learning depends heavily on how and where you do it: it depends on who is there, what is around you and how you learn.

It turns out that in the long-term people learn information best when they are exposed to it in different ways or different contexts.

When learning is highly context-dependent, it doesn’t transfer well or stick as well over the years.

I had a friend at University who swore that standing on a chair or up against a wall helped him to revise.

I used to laugh at him but there was method in his madness.

9. Memory, reloaded

If you want to learn to play tennis, is it better to spend one week learning to serve, the next week the forehand, the week after the backhand, and so on?

Or should you mix it all up with serves, forehands and backhands every day?

It turns out that for long-term retention, memories are more easily recalled if learning is mixed up.

This is just as true for both motor learning, like tennis, as it is for declarative memory, like what’s the capital of Venezuela (to save you googling: it’s Caracas).

The trouble is that learning like this is worse to start off with.

If you practice your serve then quickly switch to the forehand, you ‘forget’ how to serve.

So you feel things are going worse than if you just practice your serve over-and-over again.

But, in the long-run this kind of mix-and-match learning works best.

One explanation for why this works is called the ‘reloading hypothesis’.

Each time we switch tasks we have to ‘reload’ the memory.

This process of reloading strengthens the learning.

10. Learning is under your control

The practical upshot of these facts about memory is that we often underestimate how much control we have over our own memory and recall.

For example, people tend to think that some things are, by their nature, harder to learn, and so they give up.

However, techniques like using different contexts, switching between tasks and strenuous reconstruction of memories can all help boost retention.

People also tend to think that the past is fixed and gone; it can’t be changed.

But how we recall the past and think about it can be changed.

Recalling memories in different ways can help us re-interpret the past and set us off on a different path in the future.

For example, studies have shown that people can crowd out painful negative memories by focusing on more positive ones (Levy & Anderson, 2008).

All in all, these facts about memory reveal that our recall isn’t as poor as we might imagine.

It may not work like a computer, but that’s what makes it all the more fascinating to understand and experience.

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