The minute Richard walked into our training session, I could tell he was a skeptic. A gentle yet tough former active-duty soldier who now worked for a military research center, he hung back, quiet and reserved. He was unfailingly polite. But I could see it in his eyes—he wasn’t on board, not at all.
This was a “training for trainers” program that my colleague Scott Rogers and I were leading. Richard had been sent by his bosses to learn how to deliver mindfulness training to military cohorts. His job in the Research Transition Office at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research was to help adapt new science (like ours, on the attentional benefits of mindfulness practice) into training that the US Army could offer soldiers. But he had serious doubts. He was deeply concerned that mindfulness would clash with his religious beliefs. His Christianity was the bedrock of his life and beliefs, and he worried about the directive from his employer to train other soldiers in mindfulness, and to learn it for himself first. Would he be able to do his job?
When he walked into the session that first morning, he said he felt on edge. “My mindset was, I’m going to find a way out of this.”
But as we went through the material, his resistance started to melt. There was nothing religious in nature. The mission of mindfulness training, and the reasons it worked to strengthen attention, working memory, and mood, made a lot of sense to him. The message that soldiers often weren’t able to respond to the demands of the moment because of other worries they carried really resonated. He started thinking, This could really be helpful. And he started to wonder: When he prayed—a practice that was deeply meaningful to him—was he there, mentally? Was he attending to the prayer? When he was with his kids, who were growing up fast, was he actually with them? His teenage children were always trying to share memories with him: “It was so funny when . . .” “Dad, remember that time when . . . ?” He’d think, Oh wow, I don’t remember that at all.
He’d always written it off: I just have a terrible memory. Now he wondered—did he actually have a terrible memory, or was it something else? Every time his kids tried to connect with him over a shared experience, he felt a pang.
“I realized that I couldn’t be part of those memories with them because I wasn’t part of the moment to begin with. I was in another place, all the time.”
Even though he’d been physically present for these events (he had the pictures to prove it), he hadn’t actually experienced them. Busy, pressured, and driven, he felt that his attention was forever elsewhere, no matter what he was doing, no matter whom he was with.
“I wasn’t there,” he says now, “so I didn’t remember it.”
Memory can be tricky. We assume that we’ll remember much more than we do. Then we run up against a moment like the one Richard experienced with his children, and we wonder how much of our lives we are fully taking in. What have we failed to record? Important moments with loved ones, essential knowledge—or more? You might make a mistake because something you do know doesn’t surface in the moment you need it; you have a frustrating, fuzzy sense of I should know that. You want to listen and remember the content of an important meeting or a lovely moment with your family; meanwhile you’re going over a regrettable incident from your past, something that’s already in your long-term memory that you’d rather forget.
It’s easy to wonder if there’s something wrong with your memory—why experiences and learning seem to slip off instead of sink into your long-term storage. Yet for every single one of those examples—why some memories stick and others don’t, why knowledge surfaces when you need it sometimes but not at other times—there’s an explanation. And it probably doesn’t have much to do with your actual memory. What we think is a memory problem is often an attention problem.
Take out your phone for a moment. Now open your camera roll and scroll back to the last event you photographed. It could be anything—maybe it’s something big (a concert with your friends) or something small (a pic of your cat on your couch). Looking at the photos you took, ask yourself:
When I popped open my camera roll just now and scrolled back through time, the first event that grabbed my attention was the last family dinner we had before Leo left for college—he was all grown up and heading out into the world, and I’d wanted all four of us together at the table for one last special meal. Looking at the photo, I vividly remember trying to get the angle just right, for everybody to be smiling and looking at the camera. But I don’t remember what we talked about or much else about the meal.
If you’re not a photo-taker, look through your text threads—have you sent a screenshot or article to anyone recently? Do you remember why? Do you recall what it was about? Or have the context and content utterly vanished?
It’s tempting to think of memory as the brain’s record button. And indeed, I’ve been using the “press record” concept as a metaphor here for how we remember. But we don’t really “record” . . . not exactly.
Remembering is a complex, nuanced process. Memories are mutable, not static. Unlike a photo on your camera roll, they don’t stay the same every time you pull them up. Memories morph and change. And some things stick in our memories while others fall away. Rest assured: there’s probably nothing wrong with your memory. This is just how memory works. Our memory privileges certain types of information, and we forget other things completely, by evolutionary design. What you might say is “wrong” with your memory probably has an evolutionarily selected purpose.
Your memory is not a verbatim recorder of events. Your mind might be a fantastic time traveler, but you can’t “rewind” and relive events exactly as they happened—because there is no “exactly as it happened.” What you remember is filtered through your experience of what happened, as well as the experiences you had before and after. “Episodic memory,” which is your memory for experiences, involves selective encoding of only those aspects of experience that were most attended to and held in working memory. Translation: you’ll only remember what you focused on and “wrote” on your whiteboard—not everything that occurred. And further, your episodic memory doesn’t merely involve the external aspects of events (who, what, where, and so forth) but is deeply wrapped up in your autobiographical take on what you experienced. So—was the experience happy? Sad? Interesting? Tense? Your emotional experience will influence what you focus on—and therefore what you remember.
“Semantic memory”—meaning your general world knowledge, for facts, ideas, concepts—is similarly selective. What you remember is based on what else you’ve previously learned.
Both these types of memory are not only inexorably linked with attention, but also a tightening circle: what we pay attention to is what we remember, and what we remember will influence what we pay attention to—and therefore what else we remember.
A friend of mine who has little kids mentioned her concerns about the kinds of memories her kids are making—specifically, the memories they’re making about her.
She described yelling at her son earlier that day about something small. This was a few months into the COVID-19 quarantine, and everybody’s nerves were getting a little frayed.
“I thought, Oh, I hope he doesn’t remember this, out of all the good things we did today,” she said. “And then I started thinking about it and realized that most of my very specific memories of my own mother from when I was a kid are the negative ones. I remember very vividly the times she was frustrated, or yelled, or when I was in trouble. There’s only a handful of them, but I remember them very specifically, every detail. Meanwhile, it’s hard to remember any of the good stuff in much detail. And it was mostly good stuff! She spent all day every day taking care of us, setting up art projects, being patient, listening to our stories—and all I remember are negative things? Is that what my kids are going to remember about me—only the bad stuff?”
When I responded, I started with the bad news: Yes, we remember negative information better than positive information. (Although the good news is that this bias does fade as we age into our sixties.) Our “record button,” such as it is, does not record events comprehensively and with veracity—because the purpose of memory is not to allow us to savor the past, but rather to help us act in the world now. Memory, like attention itself, is a completely biased system that evolved to privilege survival. We are always “subsampling” experiences that are important to our survival—that’s why scary or stressful experiences are more prominent.
Memory allows us to learn. It provides stability and continuity. The things that happen to us that are constant or “normal” tend to fade into the background, while the things that are outliers are more privileged—they become more salient in our memory. This feature of memory is once again yoked to attention, which privileges novel and outlier events.
Here’s what I told my friend: that her negative memories of childhood stood out was, in fact, a great sign. It meant she’d had a happy, stable childhood. And the same would probably be true for her own children. Yes, they might remember certain episodes more than others. But if the backdrop of their lives is loving and positive, that too is part of their memory—specifically their semantic memory. We cannot remember every single episode—such a function wouldn’t serve us.
Which is why we forget.
Forgetting is a highly evolved brain feature that we absolutely need in order to function. Just as you’d be overwhelmed without your attention system to filter and select, so it is with memory.
Long-term memory in most healthy individuals has a large capacity, but that also means it’s prone to interference: information you remembered before messes up your ability to learn new information, while information you’re learning now can mess up what you learned previously.
During the coronavirus pandemic, for a brief early period, we were told that face masks were unnecessary, and that it was irresponsible to wear them; at the time, it was believed the virus could not be easily passed from one person to the next unless you were in direct contact and that masks could best help medical professionals who were being exposed to severe cases up close. Masks won’t help you, so leave them for the doctors and nurses, was the directive. But soon after, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines quickly changed. Suddenly, we were required to wear masks at all times and it was irresponsible not to wear a mask. The old rule, “Don’t wear a mask,” needed to be forgotten so that the new rule, “Always wear a mask,” could be remembered.
Even remembering every single joyful moment in your life would be overwhelming—we need to filter and select with memory, just as with attention.
Forgetting is a good thing. It’s a feature, not a flaw in our biological makeup. We need it—we rely on it, just as we rely on other “features” of memory, like negative experiences’ becoming more salient, for survival, learning, and decision making. Another reason we have memory is for learning—for guiding us in how to act in the present moment and in the future. For that to work, it’s every bit as important that we forget as it is that we remember. The mind works the way it does for good reason—we wouldn’t want to fundamentally change any of these “features” of memory. And yet there are vulnerabilities within the system, and we do run into certain issues because of them.
Let’s come back to your camera roll. When you opened it at the beginning of this chapter, did you happen to notice how many photos were in there? I just looked at mine: there are thousands.
We photograph and record information that’s important to us because we know how shaky memory can be and we want to remember it. Ironically, it’s often that very act of preservation that prevents us from doing just that.
A 2018 social media study set out to investigate an important question: Does documenting an event influence how you experience it? In the study, researchers designed a series of situations where people would be evaluated on their enjoyment of and engagement in an experience right in the moment, as well as their memory of it later. Participants were assigned to one of three groups: some were asked to document the experience for social media sharing, others were asked to document it simply for themselves, and the final group was asked to make no documentation whatsoever. One of the experiences was watching a TED talk, and another was a self-guided tour of Stanford University’s Memorial Church in Palo Alto.
On the topic of enjoyment and engagement, the results were mixed. In some situations, participants seemed to really enjoy the experience of curating content for others to consume, viewing it as a source of connection and community, so it added to their enjoyment of the experience. Meanwhile, others worried about how their post would be perceived, or compared themselves to others on social media, detracting from their enjoyment. On the subject of memory, the results were consistent and clear: people who were asked to photograph events—either for others on social media, or just for themselves—were much worse at remembering details of those events later.
Why? First, documenting something requires multitasking—which, as we know, is actually task switching. You’re not taking a picture and experiencing what you’re photographing. You’re taking the picture or. It’s always a choice. When you’re engaged in the task of taking the picture, you cannot simultaneously be focused on the activity you’re documenting. This is as true if you’re on vacation someplace gorgeous taking a picture (will you remember that sunset?) as it is in a classroom or conference room: studies have found that media use in the classroom (like using only a laptop to take notes) is linked with a decrease in academic success. This is partly because students get tempted to go online (their chat threads and shopping carts end up full, while their minds stay empty of much of the lecture-related content) but also because of the second reason: even when we are actually “paying attention” to what we’re documenting, the way we use these devices affects how we process, and therefore remember, these experiences.
In the case of laptops in classrooms, even when students were dutifully typing out notes, they became a kind of typing robot, transcribing like Siri. The problem is, they weren’t synthesizing that information. One of the things we do naturally when we take handwritten notes is synthesize—we pay attention while listening, then analyze what was said to pull out or summarize the most important points. We have to: we simply can’t write fast enough to transcribe every word we hear, so we have to be strategic. And when we do this kind of synthesis, we’re better able to encode that information in a richer, fuller, more integrated, and consequently more long-lasting way. Note-taking on laptops ends up being a great way to get a good transcription of a lecture into your computer, but a really bad way to get any of that lecture content into your long-term memory.
Using digital devices like phones and laptops to record what we most want to remember ends up having the opposite effect. The social media study’s authors concluded that using media hinders us from later recalling the very events we are trying to preserve—because it gets in the way of really experiencing the event in the first place. We end up with a photo of something we can’t actually remember, or a transcript of a lecture we didn’t really “attend.”
Nobody wants to be told to “put down your phone.” Yet the study results were clear: people who documented their experiences remembered a lot less. It’s simple, and there’s no magical way around it: if an experience doesn’t get on your mental whiteboard—where it can be organized and synthesized, where the elements of the experience can be integrated together—it doesn’t go into long-term memory. It doesn’t even stand a chance.
When I was an undergraduate, I learned about a famous patient in neuroscience history, known in the textbooks by the initials “H. M.” In 1953, H. M. received an experimental brain surgery to treat his epilepsy. He’d been having seizures since he was ten years old, and by twenty-seven, they were so constant and debilitating that he couldn’t work. His doctors had tried higher and higher doses of anticonvulsants, but nothing was working, so they took a drastic step: they removed most of H. M.’s temporal lobes, where the epileptic “storms” were happening, in an experimental procedure called a bilateral medial-temporal lobectomy. The surgery was a success—H. M.’s epileptic episodes declined dramatically. But the temporal lobes contain multiple brain structures involved in long-term memory. How much would the surgery affect H. M.’s memory?
As it turned out, H. M. retained all his long-term memories right up to a few years before the surgery. His working memory also appeared unscathed—in lab tests, he could hold number sequences in mind for as long as he kept his focus on them, just like any of us. When researchers distracted him, however, to briefly divert his attention away from whatever he was holding in working memory, it vanished—forever.
My teaching assistant had actually worked in the very lab that ran studies on H. M.’s memory function. One night, she was at the lab working with H. M. and had been given the errand of driving him home, back to his apartment at an assisted living facility. They were in the car, chatting, when she realized that she had no idea where he lived. H. M. began to confidently guide her, and so she followed each instruction as he successfully directed her to his home . . . his childhood home, on the other side of town.
Until he died in 2008, H. M. was the subject of decades of studies on memory and memory formation. Researchers found that his early memories from before the surgery were exquisitely vivid, possibly because there were no new memories being formed to compete with them. But study after study confirmed that he only had access to working memory—no new long-term memories (for episodes or new facts) could be created. What H. M. had lost in the bilateral medial-temporal lobectomy that cured his epilepsy was the connection between working memory and long-term memory. H. M. could briefly hold content on his whiteboard, just like anyone, but had no capacity to remember it in a more enduring way.
Your working memory is not only your cognitive “scratch space” where you do your creative thinking, ideation, focusing, and goal pursuit. It’s also the portal into (and out of!) long-term memory. The stuff you want to remember gets into your long-term memory through working memory, and when we retrieve information from long-term memory, working memory is where it appears. To “remember” is in fact both of these functions—encode and retrieve—packed together: you encode something, and then fish it back up later. Each of these processes requires the effective use of both your attention and your working memory. And as we know, we encounter myriad opportunities for those systems to fail, get captured by something salient, lose track of the goal, go blank, or become distracted by competing information.
My mother-in-law called me recently, slightly panicked about her memory. As she has been getting older, lapses in her attention now upset her more—they could be indicators of a bigger problem, she believes, and that makes her nervous. I asked her to tell me exactly what happened.
She recounted her shopping trip the day before. She was driving to the supermarket. Halfway there she realized she’d forgotten her list, so she started running over everything she was intending to buy in her mind. She parked at the supermarket, got out of the car, and made a mental note about where she parked. She went in, bought her groceries, and pushed the cart back to her car. But as she was loading the groceries into the trunk, she noticed a scrape on the paint. She felt a rush of irritation at herself. When on earth had she sideswiped something? She hadn’t even noticed!
She returned her cart, worrying about the scrape, and got in the driver’s seat—only to realize that this car had a manual transmission. Hers was an automatic.
She was in the wrong car.
She located her own car—an identical model and color, without the scrape on the paint—just a couple of spots down in the same row, and sheepishly moved all her groceries. We both laughed together as she told me the story—to have gotten all the way into some stranger’s car! I explained to her that I didn’t think it was a problem with her memory—or, in fact, anything to do with the aging brain. Yes, our brains do age along with the rest of us. Parts of the brain get thinner and less dense, including the hippocampus and other medial-temporal lobe structures that we need to form explicit memories. And this can indeed cause memory issues. But in this episode, her whiteboard had simply been overloaded. As she was parking, she was rehearsing her forgotten list. She thought she was noting where she parked, but actually she was holding a ton of stuff on her whiteboard. She simply didn’t have room.
A lot of the issues we see around memory and aging are actually misattributed. The problem is not “you’re losing your memory.” Rather, the problem is “you weren’t paying attention and failed to encode.”
A caveat to this story: where you parked your car isn’t something you’d ever really want to remember long-term. In fact, this is an example of one of those times when you want to be able to forget—imagine if you could remember every single place you ever parked and had to sift through all the locations every time you walked out the sliding doors of a grocery store. Like attention, memory must serve as a filter, selecting what’s relevant and what’s not, what should be highlighted, and what should be dumped. I use this story simply as an example of how holding a lot in your working memory can get in the way of anything making its way into long-term memory in any kind of effective way.
And further: if your working memory is overloaded, knowledge from long-term memory can’t always get out when you need it. This was the cause of one of the deadliest “friendly fire” incidents in recent US history.
It was 2002, the height of the war in Afghanistan, and an American soldier was using a GPS system to guide a two-thousand-pound bomb to its intended target, an insurgent outpost. In this system, the soldier on the ground would input the coordinates for the airstrike into the handheld GPS device, and then the bomb would drop to hit that precise location. Before carrying out the strike, however, the soldier noticed that the batteries in the handheld GPS were low, so he switched them out for new ones. Then he sent the displayed coordinates to drop the bomb—which landed on his own battalion.
What happened? In that GPS system, when the batteries are replaced, the rebooted system defaults to displaying the coordinates of its own location. The soldier operating the system knew this—he’d been trained extensively on the procedures. After you change out batteries, you have to re-input the drop coordinates. This knowledge was in his long-term memory; he’d rehearsed it many times. But for some reason, it didn’t “load” onto his whiteboard when he needed it. He looked at the faulty coordinates and sent them. A lot of people died that day. And it was because of a problem between one soldier’s long-term and working memory. I can only guess at the explanation, but it may be a tragically simple one: if working memory is overwhelmed by stress-induced mind-wandering, then knowledge may not surface when it’s most urgently needed.
This is an extreme example, but any of us can experience breakdowns like these during processes of memory encoding and retrieval. Multiple steps are required in the process of encoding and retrieving memories, and all of them require your attention and your working memory.
To remember, you do three critical things. The first: rehearsal. You trace over information—the name you just heard as a new colleague introduced herself; the most important facts from the work training you’re in; the details of a good experience you just had. In school, when you studied with flashcards, that was rehearsal; when you go over the nuances of a joyful moment (your child’s wedding—the toasts, the taste of the cake), that too is rehearsal; when you find yourself reliving a painful or embarrassing moment, even that (unfortunately) also becomes rehearsal.
Then: elaboration. Similar to rehearsal, this involves relating new experiences or facts to knowledge or memories you already have. You can store a much stronger memory for things when you already have a base of knowledge. Example: picture an octopus. Now I tell you: An octopus has three hearts. If you didn’t already know that, you are—right now as you read this—tethering that new knowledge to that existing image you have of an octopus. The next time you see one in an aquarium or in a nature show on TV, you might suddenly remember, turn to your companion, and say, Did you know that an octopus has three hearts?
And finally: consolidation. This is what happens as you’re performing the above two functions, and it ultimately leads to the memory being stored. As the brain replays information, it’s laying down new neural pathways and then going over them, strengthening those new connections. This is, essentially, how information gets from working memory into long-term memory: the brain structurally changes to solidify a particular neural representation—and it needs time for unconstrained, spontaneous thought to do that. That’s why we think that mental downtime and sleep are both important: they’re opportunities for memory consolidation. It’s also part of the reason we experience mind-wandering—one thing that can fuel that mental roaming about is neural activity related to replaying experiences we’ve had. With more replays, all the noise fades away and the clear signal remains, which is what comprises the memory trace in the brain. If your attention is constantly engaged, with zero mental downtime for you to experience the emergence of conscious spontaneous thought, you may be degrading the link between working memory and long-term memory. You’re disabling vital consolidation processes.
The process of remembering—already subject to your framing, biases, experience, and previous knowledge—is fragile and easily disrupted. It gets derailed when your attention is hijacked away. When something other than what you want to remember takes over your working memory, the memory-making process is interrupted. And ironically, that “something” is often long-term memory itself.
Memory can fail if, during the process of encoding, attention does exactly what it often does: wanders. When it’s grabbed by some salient thing. When it strays back to the hot topics and preoccupations that have become conflict states. Those attention-grabbing thoughts have as their raw materials long-term memory traces. These are concepts and experiences that can be reconfigured in new ways to create a new worry or they may comprise existing memories that are already fully formed. They become the content for mind-wandering.
When I spoke earlier about mental time travel, what I meant was: you’ve been hijacked by content created by your own mind, using the raw materials from your long-term memory. This content can interfere with your ability to pay attention to what is taking place in the actual moment. And this makes it difficult for you to form new memories of your current experience.
Remember the default mode network—the brain network seen in study after study of mind-wandering? It turns out that this network is made up of smaller subnetworks. One of these subnetworks has nodes comprising the medial-temporal long-term memory system we’ve been talking about. I think of this subnetwork like a thought pump. It pumps out content like memory traces and other mental chatter generated by raw memory input. It does this even without our conscious awareness.
And sometimes, this pump spits out salient information that grabs our attentional flashlight. It’s no different than the pull on our flashlight when threatening, novel, shiny, or self-related stimuli happens in our external environment. In fact, a second subnetwork of the default mode network functions like a flashlight for the inner landscape—sometimes this is called the “core default mode network.” This term seems appropriate, given that self-relatedness is at the core of what grabs our attention by default.
Salient in your inner landscape are things that are:
Not only will these things grab your attention—they may also keep your attention, filling your working memory with this content to further elaborate on. Unlike some attentional captures that grab you and let go quickly, salient content from the “thought pump” tends to really suck you in. It becomes the gateway for the loop of doom. And it informs other types of mind-wandering too—it’s your past experiences that you use to decide what you should worry about and plan for.
The great irony of long-term memory is that it supplies the raw materials for what may pull you away from forming new memories.
Eric Schoomaker was serving as Surgeon General of the US Army when his father died suddenly. It was completely unexpected—he was healthy and vibrant, so nobody saw it coming. It also came at a furiously busy time in Eric’s career.
Two years later, in the middle of dinner, he looked up at his wife and said, “Dad died.”
She stared at him. “Yes,” she said. “Two years ago.” And he replied, “Well, I guess the tape finally caught up.”
We know by now that we need to stay in play. One of the reasons is that for the most part, you can only “record” in play-mode. The memory-making process begins in the present moment. Yes, there’s work that your brain does after that to make a memory a memory—but it starts with the raw input (from either the environment or your own mind) that you get from the now. You can’t do it later or put it off. Now is the only time you can record.
We have so much to think about: past events to process; future events to plan for and anticipate. Our time is so precious, so valuable, so often slipping through our fingers like sand. We can be in the middle of something that we need or want to remember, and we think, I’ll come back to this later. I’ll think about it later. I’ll remember it later. . . . But attention can’t be saved. You have to use it now. And when you realize that, it changes the way you orient to experiences—and the way you remember them.
If you feel that you can’t participate in shared memories (like Richard from the Army Institute of Research did), or if you feel out of step with the events in your life (like Eric Schoomaker did, experiencing the “lag” in his tape), it may be an embodied attention problem. Our memories are strongly tied to our senses. So, one way to boost our chances of remembering the things we care about is to use mindfulness training to root ourselves in the body.
Our memories for experiences, or episodic memory, involve vivid contextual details—sensory details like sounds and smells, how we felt, and what thoughts we had in the moment. Episodic memory has a highly specific state of consciousness associated with it, called autonoetic consciousness. This term describes the embodied fullness—the richness, the detail, the three-dimensional depth—we have when we recall an episode from our lives with self-awareness. Try it out now: think of a specific favorite childhood memory. Maybe it’s a memory of getting ice cream with your grandmother on a hot summer day, or washing your family car with your siblings. Autonoetic consciousness is that feeling of having experienced the event from the inside. You might remember the tastes, sounds, smells, expressions on others’ faces. You might remember feeling joy or happiness. And recalling it may actually produce a small jolt of joy right now.
How we remember episodic memory also gives us a clue as to how to encode episodic memory. For more detail and richness, we fill up our whiteboards with all those granular elements.
Your working memory is a great tool for memory, and also a major point of vulnerability—if it’s occupied with other content besides the experience you want to encode or the information you’re trying to learn, there won’t be effective memory-making. Simply being physically present for something doesn’t mean you’ll absorb it. You need to intentionally place your focus (flashlight) on what you want to encode. And further: you need to make sure both your mind and body show up for the stuff you want to remember.
In our next core practice, you’ll anchor yourself in your physical sensations. You may begin to notice discomfort, or even pain. It might be a breeze on your skin or an itch on your forehead. It might be hunger. It might even be the complete absence of sensation. Regardless of what’s there, you place your flashlight on it. Use your flashlight like a searchlight and move it slowly through the body—in doing so, you practice being in the body in the present moment. You practice being in the present moment in an embodied way.
CORE PRACTICE: BODY SCAN
As you do this “searchlight sweep” you’ll also start to see how stress, worries, and emotions are showing up in the body. You can start to observe your own emotions, and how they show up there. If it starts to feel difficult, like you’re having trouble holding focus through this practice, you can always default to the Find Your Flashlight practice in chapter 4 as an anchor. That’s your foundation. It’s a good landing pad if you feel as if you’re getting off-track by having a moving target as you guide your attention through the body. But once you’ve stabilized the flashlight back on your breath, resume the body sweep if you can. This practice is perhaps better tailored to memory-making because it roots you not only in the present moment, but also in the body.
When you train your mind to pay attention in this way, you are setting yourself up to acquire and retain more and better data. You are able to encode experiences more richly. You can learn new information more thoroughly. You might not be able to remember everything, but you can certainly remember better.
My daughter is a dancer. I was annoyed the first time I went to one of her recitals and discovered their hard and fast rule: no video or photography. I put my phone back in my purse, a little upset that I wouldn’t be able to record Sophie’s performance for posterity. Then, as I sat there watching her on stage, illuminated in the spotlight, I felt my attention begin to focus and intensify. I mentally zoomed in on her. I remember trying my best to feel her dance. To notice the way she moved, the soft thumping sounds of her feet on the stage coming through under the music, the tight look on her face when she began and the satisfied look when she finished, knowing she’d done well. The fullness of the experience felt really good to me. In that instance, I simply had no choice but to fully pay attention. And my memory of that recital is still vivid.
At the beginning of this chapter, we looked at how using devices like phones and laptops to preserve stuff we want to remember can massively backfire, making it less likely that we’ll remember what we most want to. So, do you need to put down the phone?
Not necessarily. Another study involving participants taking photographs of artwork in a museum initially found the same as the one we discussed earlier: photographing the artwork left people remembering less. As before, when they “offloaded” into the camera, they also forgot the content. But here there was a twist. They were then asked to use the camera’s ability to zoom in on a particular segment of a painting as they photographed it. In that instance, their ability to recall details of the experience rocketed back up. The simple act of zooming in—deciding what to focus on and then doing it—allowed people to remember more depth and detail of the experience.
I’m not saying that you shouldn’t photograph things that are important to you. But the next time you do take out your phone to capture something you want to remember, take a minute. Take in the scene outside the rectangle of the phone. Hold in your mind what you really want to remember. Notice the details, the sights and smells and colors; notice your own emotions. What you’re doing is maximizing and integrating the elements of the experience in your working memory in order to encode the fullness of the experience. Imagine viewing a scene in color instead of in black and white, or in 3D instead of 2D. Mindfulness exercises help train your attention to be more fully in the moment as it’s happening—which can add that fullness to your episodic memories.
You don’t need to make every photograph you take a huge exercise in mindfulness—sometimes a photo can just be a photo! But it’s very easy to live our lives behind these devices and to create a stream of digital memories without making actual memories. And combating this need not be a time-intensive process. Simply taking a moment to mindfully notice and to fully experience events or surroundings could make a big difference in our ability to remember them. When there’s something you really want to remember, zoom in.
And finally: if you want to remember the things you experience and the things you learn, you need to allow for the free flow of spontaneous thought. If your days are all engagement, all the time, you’re skipping a critical step we discussed earlier: opportunities for consolidation.
At the grocery store, you fill your cart and head to the checkout. Bummer—there’s a long line at every station. You get in the shortest line and pull out your phone. There’s a work email and a personal one—you read both, then start drafting a response to the work one with your thumb. A notification pings and you click it; the email draft autosaves and you swipe over to Twitter, where someone in your field has replied to something you posted earlier. You want to be supportive, so you click the heart and retweet, then scroll—a news article about climate change catches your eye and you tap it. You’re halfway through skimming the article when the checker announces your total, loading plastic bags into your cart—the eco-friendly canvas bags you brought are still tucked under your arm.
Sound familiar? I know it does to me. We live busy lives. The urge to pack as much as possible into every pocket of time is intense. If I didn’t draft that work email while standing in line, I’d have had to do it later, in the lab, when I could have been doing . . . something else.
It often seems necessary to use our time in this way—we think of time as a commodity; it has a price, and it’s generally quite valuable. We don’t want to waste it. And we don’t see mental downtime, when we purposefully disengage from finding, gripping, and tightly pointing our attentional flashlight to some urgent and occupying task, as a valuable thing to do. But that’s only because most of us don’t realize how critically necessary it is. Ever had a great idea in the shower? It’s not because the scent of your shampoo is oh, so inspiring—the shower is forced mental downtime. You can’t take your phone in there, or your laptop, or a book. You’re trapped in a small, wet box with nothing in particular demanding your attention. It can become a creative, generative time where you make connections, or have ideas, or maybe sink into daydreams that actually have the vital function of assisting in memory formation and solidifying learning.
We need white space in order to reflect on what we hear and experience. For those in leadership roles, this can feel like a challenge, but also a chance to do something innovative. Memory-making and learning are benefits of mindfulness training, yes, but you need both: to be mentally present in the moment, and then to have space to let the mind roam free, unconstrained by any task or demand.
Is the answer to take more showers? Well, sure, if you can spare the time and water! But now that you know, you can create micro-moments and even nano-moments for unconstrained spontaneous thought throughout the day. Try this: Leave your phone in your pocket or purse. If you are up for it, leave it hidden in the car. At work, walking from one meeting to the next, feel your feet walking and let whatever comes to mind come and go. Remind yourself that these unconstrained mind moments are valuable—more valuable than filling every second with tasks.
We fail to remember when we fail to notice what our attention is up to. We don’t bring our attention into the present moment. We forget to point our flashlight. We don’t keep that selection in working memory long enough—we get hijacked away by distraction in the outer landscape or the inner one. We privilege all engagement, all the time.
Mindfulness practice as attention training allows us to notice when we are no longer in the moment we want to remember. We now have a choice, and we can choose to intervene. To notice when highly salient, highly “sticky” content is circulating in working memory, and to intervene by coming back to the present moment in an embodied way. This can be especially important when we encounter a particularly potent “loop of doom” with memories that are really damaging or upsetting—as with trauma.
Traumatic memories can feel indelibly written, as if etched into metal. Are they unique? Like many important topics, this one is under active debate. What we do know is that trauma leads to: reexperiencing the stressful event, avoiding reminders of the trauma, and over-activating the alerting system. These symptoms lessen and resolve over time. But when they don’t and people continue to suffer, it becomes a clinical disorder—post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There is growing evidence that clinical treatments involving mindfulness can help PTSD patients. And here I want to bring up an important caveat: self-guided mindfulness training is NOT a replacement for a clinical treatment. Trauma can be extremely complicated, and people experiencing clinical levels of PTSD should seek treatment by a competent therapist.
I’m not a clinician—I’m a neuroscientist and a researcher—so I don’t treat PTSD. But a lot of us have experienced trauma, or have upsetting memories or thoughts that can become intrusive or distracting, even without a diagnosis of PTSD. In my opinion, it’s pretty hard to go through life without accumulating some of those. And we all need tools to deal with that. A big part of that is knowing when, and how, to address the stuff that’s coming up repeatedly on your whiteboard. We’ve practiced noticing the types of mental content that can arise (thoughts, feelings, sensations), and then letting them pass away instead of engaging with them. This skill can certainly help you with intrusive, upsetting memories. And in the coming chapters, we’ll be adding more practices to our toolkit.
Certain things may become “sticky” on our whiteboards because of generalization. We can make generalizations about the behavior and intentions of others (“She never supports me”) or regarding ourselves (“I will never amount to anything”). An incident where you made a mistake becomes “I always get this stuff wrong—I’m such an idiot!” It’s not the incident itself that takes center stage on your whiteboard: it’s the generalization you derived from it. The oversimplified packaging allows it to remain in working memory with minimal effort: it’s short, it’s clear, and it probably isn’t accurate.
The generalizations we come up with can be helpful because they efficiently condense information we need to remember. Yet generalizations can be harmful when they’re wrong, and whenever you’re dealing with complex emotional states they are often wrong, or at least form only part of the picture. This becomes critical when we use the raw materials from our long-term memory for simulations, which we do all day, every day, every minute we’re awake.
Your mind is an incredible virtual-reality machine—the best there is. It can create entire worlds by drawing on your memory and knowledge, worlds full of sights and sounds and even emotions both experienced and imagined. You create simulations all the time—and you need to. It’s how you plan and strategize and innovate: You imagine the future. You spool out various possibilities. Our knowledge and experiences are what allow us to forecast events in the future, to be prepared and high-performing.
The problem we run into is that these detailed simulations that we create are by necessity—like all virtual reality—incredibly transportive stories spooled by our own minds. They grab our attention and then keep us there. So, what happens when our stories turn out to be just . . . wrong?