Newswise, June 27, 2017 – Memories
that stick with us for a lifetime are those that fit in with a lot of other
things we remember – but have a slightly weird twist.
It’s this notion of
‘peculiarity’ that can help us understand what makes lasting memories,
according to Per Sederberg, a professor of psychology at The Ohio State
University.
“You have to build a memory on
the scaffolding of what you already know, but then you have to violate the
expectations somewhat. It has to be a little bit weird,” Sederberg said.
Sederberg talked about the
neuroscience of memory as an invited speaker at the prestigious Cannes Lions
Festival of Creativity in France on June 19. He spoke at the session “What are
memories made of? Stirring emotions and last impressions” along with several
advertising professionals and artists.
Sederberg has spent his career
studying memory. In one of his most notable studies, he had college students
wear a smartphone around their neck with an app that took random photos for a
month. Later, the participants relived memories related to those photos in an
fMRI scanner so that Sederberg and his colleagues could see where and how the
brain stored the time and place of those memories.
From his own research and that
of others, Sederberg has ideas on which memories stick with us and which ones
fade over time.
The way to create a
long-lasting memory is to form an association with other memories, he said.
“If we want to be able to
retrieve a memory later, you want to build a rich web. It should connect
to other memories in multiple ways, so there are many ways for our mind to get
back to it.”
A memory of a lifetime is like
a big city, with many roads that lead there. We forget memories that are
desert towns, with only one road in. “You want to have a lot of different ways
to get to any individual memory,” Sederberg said.
The difficulty is how to best
navigate the push and pull between novelty and familiarity. Novelty tells us
what is important to remember. On the other hand, familiarity tells us what we
can ignore, but helps us retrieve information later, Sederberg said.
Too much novelty, and you have
no way to place it in your cognitive map, but too much familiarity and the
information is similarly lost.
What that means is that
context and prediction play critical roles in shaping our perception and
memory. The most memorable experiences are those that arise in a familiar and
stable context, yet violate some aspect of what we predict would occur in that
context, he said.
“Those peculiar experiences
are the things that stand out, that make a more lasting memory.”
Sederberg’s co-presenters, all
based in London, are Dominique Bonnafoux, a senior strategist at FITCH; Mike
Reed, founder and creative director of Reed Words; and Jason Bruges, a
multidisciplinary artist and designer.
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