I've written two helpful postings about memory, as part of my series on self-healing (one on adding more capacity, and one on retrieving lost memories.. Now it's time to work on forgetting!
It's famously impossible to will yourself to forget. The classic illustration is to challenge someone to not think of a pink elephant. One inevitably conjures a mental pink elephant. Willful forgetting involves remembering, so we need to approach forgetting indirectly.
Imagine this. You have a busy day. Lots of challenging tasks. But, for some reason, it's relentlessly on your mind that you need to BUY MILK. Perhaps the milk's not even so important. But the daemons in your mind - the alarms and reminders and alerts and vigils - are peppering you with MILK MILK MILK.
The easy route is to delegate someone to go buy some. Once that person leaves the room, the daemon will be silenced. Relief! In fact, it's so effective that when they return with milk...well, I'll let you visualize it. How will you react?
You'll be surprised. Oh! The milk! Right! Thanks! You'll have forgotten all about it. Because delegated tasks are so thoroughly wiped that it takes effort to mentally rekindle them. So if some certain mental thingie won't stop popping up, try delegating it.
To whom? It doesn't matter! It's about the mere act of delegation. You don't need an actual person doing actual things. Just the momentary experience of delegation, which ensures a clean, forgetting.
Delegate it to GOD (if you're into that) to worry about. Or to your dead ancestors. Or to your dog or cat or fish. Or buy yourself a toy orangutan. No transfer ceremony is required. No words must be spoken or actions taken. Just brusquely mentally assign the orangutan, and be satisfied that your empty annoyance is being appropriately handled.
Here are some examples of the sorts of things best forgotten in a given moment.
Be careful what you feed into the process. Nothing that needs to be front-of-mind. Not feelings of guilt, shame or anxiety, either, if such feelings require processing in the present moment. Anything needful should be handled, or scheduled, or added to your to-do list. This isn't a trick to escape responsibility, it's a refuge from needless self-torture and distraction. If there's no benefit to a certain thought or issue careening around inside your head in a given moment, it's time to delegate.
I once suggested a variation for insomniacs. Know that your pillow gently sucks thoughts out of your head, so simply stop resisting this natural process. Release it all into your pillow. In fact, you can even let your entire self be sucked into the pillow.
Understand the need for a stable delegatee. Loosely propositional notions tend to dissolve. We don't trust them. So we need an established go-to, mental or physical. Even some random toy (me, I go with a crocodile). But there's one pitfall: the fear of feeling ridiculous.
"Grown-ups," one might understandably declare, "don't resort to whimsical appeals to toy orangutans. I'm not some pathetic weakling. I don't turn to needy childish contrivances. I soberly suck it up!"
Fair enough! But think, for a moment, about how level-headed and realistic you truly are. Here's a line I used to re-use a lot in the Slog's early days:
Human beings spend their lives in conflict with imaginary people: mentally rearguing old arguments, worrying about faceless attackers and detractors, reliving bygone humiliations, and generally using our imaginations to make our lives a living hell.
That's considered "normal", but using the same faculty in positive ways to help us cope seems, for some bizarre reason, childish and loopy.
If you're so naive about the human condition to ask me whether this makes you forget something forever, I'll remind you that humans don't do anything "forever". You're not a Disney movie princess. "Permanent" is not a condition experienced by real people outside their cinematic self-imaginings. We're not heroic protagonists, we're raindrops slowly working down windows.
And, yup, it's reframing. Reframing is always the answer. We forget how available it is to us in every single moment.
A few years ago I offered, to the customary rousing acclaim, a way to easily add 57% more memory capacity via reframing. Here's a similar use case.
Long story short, a quick bout of food poisoning mushroomed into a biological infection, and I'm in Europe so everyone's super into probiotics ("fauna replenishment" was the previous sanctimony to references to "The Planet"). So I've been given an antibiotic plus two forms of probiotics - which strikes me as idiotic, given that the former will slaughter the latter). But part of avoiding Ugly Americanism is to play it cool and follow instructions.
But one more thing. As I daily pit cooties against anti-cooties - spoiler: the anti-cooties win - countless millions or even billions of microorganism corpses will be generated to slowly decompose in my system, releasing all manner of toxins. If this sounds unbearably awful, consider that you experience something similar when you patronize steam table joints where the food's left at room temperature and it's nuked to heat and kill the cooties. Dead cooties are better than live cooties, but dead cooties are not, ahem, salubrious.
The antibiotic must be taken with food. One probiotic needs to be taken 2 hours before or after the antibiotic. And the second probiotic needs to be taken before a meal. Imagine yourself bleary with fever and dehydrated, trying to keep that straight.
But wait! There's more! I already take one pill an hour before breakfast. And pills with breakfast. Plus night-time pills. Now it feels like we're approaching a logistics saturation point.
Maybe time to brute force the whole thing into a calendar structure with timers, and carry around a (wink-wink/nudge-nudge) medications bag.
But the preexisting regime is KNOWN to me. I don't have to think of it. It's baked in. It just happens. It's not pill-taking complication, it's an entirely different sector of daily life. There's no reason to group it all together into one big blur. The two processes don't touch, needn't touch. It's only the presence of the word "pill" that makes me imagine any such thing.
No, this needs to be framed as two independent processes: life-as-it's-always been, plus (now that I've taken a moment to calmly map it out) 1. idiotic probiotic #2 first thing, 2. antibiotic with breakfast, and 3. idiotic probiotic #1 two hours after breakfast. That's not such a strain! Meanwhile, the usual pill-taking remains sublimely uninvolved in its separate part of the brain.
Which actually feels pleasantly odd even to me, and I'm the guy who thought this up! It reminds me of watching schools of different sorts of fish fail to interact in a large aquarium tank. The human mind might categorize them all as fish, but they never got the memo. They're like distinct civilizations.
Similarly, in the memory trick, if you have numbers to remember, your instinct will be to cram them all into your (very limited) number memory place. But just because they're all numbers doesn't mean you need to glom them together. Different numbers can be stored in different ways that don't interact at all. If you avoid over-stuffing, you can effortlessly add extra capacity.
It would be nuts to combine all the pill-taking into a complicated structure far more daunting than the sum of its parts.
A few months ago, I posted Memory Trick #1, a method for adding new slots to your brain’s memory via a reframing trick (I also posted this followup explaining how to add still more extra slots).
The following works the other end of the equation: remembering things you’ve forgotten. Prerequisite is faith that everything’s recoverable. It's true. I can affirm, after using this technique for years, that remembering is always possible. It doesn't always work quickly, but it never fails.
Like many topics here on the Slog, it's a stupendously simple matter, but so counterintuitive that I must go to some length to explain. If the following is more conceptual than you can stand, cut to the bottom section for an easy shortcut that delivers immediate remembering improvement.
The Remembering Process
Most people are extremely bad at retrieving forgotten information because successful remembering requires going against instinct. If you can control your reaction to forgetting, you'll greatly ease the process of remembering.
I remember reading an article mentioning an aboriginal group in Japan which still has a few surviving members. And there was lots more interesting stuff, which I made a mental note to read up on sometime. The note just flashed back to me...but I couldn't remember any details. I was stuck!
Web searching might yield further information on the aborigines, but not the article that had piqued my curiosity. So I needed to power through remembering unassisted by the Google machine.
Let’s replay this minor crisis in slow motion. My mind was operating normally, fluidly passing from thought to thought in a more or less straight line (with some digression and haziness). A particularly strong thought - “I must read up on aborigines in Japan!” - flashed, and was followed by....nothing. A sheer cliff, leaving my train of thought trackless.
My mind tried stubbornly to plow ahead, backing up repeatedly to the thought ("aborigines in Japan") and then trying to push forward, like spinning the wheels of a car stuck in snow. Nothing!
At such an impasse, there are three options:
1. Blunt force Back up and go forward again and again in a helpless loop, hoping the missing data magically appears. Bash your face, again and again, against the dead end. This is a very popular move.
2. Think something...anything!
Emotions arise, steering the mind into a new (but unhelpful) train of thought. We cue up the familiar "GOD DAMN IT I CAN'T REMEMBER!" script, which at least provides a sense of forward momentum, leaving us more comfortable than we were hovering at the edge of blankness. I can't remember the thing I forgot, but at least I'm doing stuff! I'm complaining and stressing over the fact that I forgot! We scowl, tighten up, slap our foreheads, and make a dramatic display that does absolutely nothing to help us remember. In fact, it's hard to imagine a better way to push away the forgotten chunk.
#1 and #2 are full of stress. Why do we behave that way? First, it’s what people on TV and in movies do when they can’t remember. Second, anything beats standing around like some goof with mouth stupidly agape and no thoughts forthcoming. You've reestablished dynamic forward momentum, regaining the impression of control by bashing away (#1) or by turning it into a drama (#2).
3. Abide in the Brain Fart Nobody does this, though it's the only move that actually works: Relax into the blankness. Rather than repeatedly try to ram through, per #1, or conjure up emotional tizzy, per #2, the gap is accepted (what choice is there, really?) and you begin to gently probe and nibble at its edges.
Choosing #3, I sit back in my chair, choosing not to furrow my brow or tense up or curse the gods. I don't make the slightest attempt to pry loose the memory. Rather than demand that the missing information present itself, I gingerly explore the gap. My attitude is relaxed, playful, curious.
First, I dip my toe into the part I did remember, re-experiencing the surprise and curiosity I'd felt upon learning that aborigine culture still exists in Japan. Cool! Without grasping, I continued to brood lazily/dreamily about where such culture might be situated...certainly not in the more populous central zones. No...it would have to be at the northern or southern tip. Southern tip immediately rings a bell for me. But I remain comfortably poised in the vacuum - the not-remembering - resisting the urge to tug at dangling strings.
I picture the south of Japan, and since this isn't a place I often visualize, the same vague mental image arose that had arisen while reading that article. Lots of water all around...someone rowing to Southern Japan and being met by aborigines...all in the past, back when that group was more intact. I settle into a lazy, expansive revery about rowing through the sea....to Southern Japan.....a long time ago. Shipwreck. Adventurers. Sneaking into Japan. Aha! I remember! It was an article about how the West tried to penetrate the insular nation at the end of the Shogun age. I suddenly re-experienced the same curiosity to read up on the subject. Deja vu means you're close!
The remembering has gained momentum, so it’s particularly important to restrain my mind's eagerness to reach for the prize. A mind derailed is a delicate thing, and unless the knot is fully untied in a state of mental relaxation (i.e. "abiding in the brain fart"), it will only tighten further. I sense, without forcing the issue, that the name of the publication would elude me if I directly seek it out.
So I sit back again, loftily immersing in the flavor, the smell, the feeling of an adventurer sneaking into Southern Japan via rowboat, claiming to be a shipwreck victim. I paddle oh-so-lightly around the hazy coastline of my memory. With great patience (constantly soothing my eager mind with the assurance that there's no hurry), I passively collect more fragments as they appear: the Shogun's hard-line prohibition of contact with foreigners; the strong currents transporting hapless Japanese mariners all the way to the North American west coast, laws requiring boat builders to intentionally cripple ships in order to prevent citizens from wandering off to other lands...
In a flash, it all spills from beyond the veil: I’d read about this in The Economist. At this point, the article was a snap to find.
Let it Go to Get it Back
The moment you become aware of an impending derailment - that a memory is about to elude your grasp - just relax into it. It's counterintuitive, like learning to steer into a skid. Get in the habit of loosening up, slowing down, and resisting the impulse to bash through via endless rewinding/fast-forwarding. Pause, amiably, in the fuzzy zone. Exist in the vacuum. As your mental train of thought stalls, begin to languidly paddle around the shadowy ambiguity, starting with whichever detached shards are available.
And keep your emotions out of it. Anger, exasperation, stress, and helplessness prevent remembering. Remain calmly aloof as you probe the edges of the gap. Have faith that the knot will unwind under the sustained light of patient curiosity. Don't expect a flash; invite one by letting it appear whenever it will. Loosen the deadline, but don't look away. Don't check your email or think about lunch. Hover weightlessly within the bubble. Remain non-insistently curious.
The sharp emotions aren’t really about memory frustration. The level of consternation is normally far out of proportion with the value of the forgotten data. How many times have you waited while an older relative painfully struggled to recover some absolutely insignificant dab of useless trivia? They're upset not about the missing information but about the gap in their mental narrative.
The brain's spigot normally gushes effortlessly. Information simply arrives. When it doesn't, deep-seated issues of control and identity arise from the subconscious. If my thoughts stop, where does that leave me? A curtain has pulled back to reveal my impermanence!
But that's wrong. You're not your thought stream. You're not the data, or the memories, or the words or deeds. You are pure subjectivity. As thoughts pause, you're the awareness that notices. By noticing, you’ve demonstrated your existence. Rocks never notice that they’re not thinking!
Since people are terribly confused about who they actually are, these gaps freak them out.
This explains the counterproductive impulses. Feeling as if we've crash-landed in an eerie silent abyss of non-existence, we flail for a sense of control, trying to reboot our mental continuity like a smoker frantically flicking her empty lighter. We’re engaged not in data recovery but in a struggle to restart the ticker tape of mental narration that establishes our sense of continuity.
Since we falsely think that we are this narration, the struggle feels existential! This is why people won't easily abandon the chase, even for garbage information. Losing continuity leaves you nowhere. A scary place.
Unless, that is, you blithely relax into it. Our thought stream is something we do, not what we are. We can easily abide in the pause. Mystics spend their lives trying to quiet their minds to experience pure awareness...and you've just had a free pass! (I'm not being glib. Brain farts - senior moments, et al - are identical to mystical states. We have only to relax into them.)
Focusing on Forgetting
Emotions reengage our sense of continuity. We flail, and the flailing becomes the new momentum. I'm no longer lapsed; my mind’s back in gear, grousing about how annoying it is to forget! I'm back, baby! I'm me!
You can opt out of all that. Don't flail. It won't help you remember. On the contrary, it buries the evidence, because what you're searching for lives in the gap you’re fleeing from! Relax into the gap, opt out of struggle, and remembering will be strangely easy.
On-the-Fly Forgetfulness
You'll be amazed at what you're able to recall. There is literally no limit to how far you can take this. No detail will escape your memory if you're able to fully relax into the gap, setting no deadline.
The only problem is that it takes time, and you can't zone out of a conversation to bask in the psychic gap. When trying to remember under inescapable time pressure, options are slim. You can make the standard brain fart jokes, or shrug, or steer the conversation elsewhere. But even under pressure, the way you react makes a critical difference. Your body will sense the gap before your mind does. Learn to relax into the inevitable, rather than contract and harden against it. Resist the urge to frown and tense up. Your odds of graceful recovery improve dramatically when you embrace rather than recoil.
To be sure, a placid response to forgetting will make you look a little weird to others ("Why did he stop talking? Why does he look so relaxed about how he stopped talking?"), but you can adjust those parameters (looking normal vs increasing your odds of remembering) to suit specific situations. Maybe pretend to grimace a little, just for the sake of social signaling.
Pity the Artists
Artists have a better feel for this. The creation of a symphony, novel or painting involves a multitude of mental stalls as you try to materialize the next note, brushstroke, or sentence. Sometimes that chunk arrives, but often it doesn't, and you must keep backing up and trying again.
Artists learn to expect dry spigots, and to proceed gently, never forcing. They become intimately familiar with dead ends, and take them in stride. In fact, they had no illusions about controlling the process to begin with. Truly creative people find gaps exhilarating, because they’re the very wellspring of creativity (we all know what happened the moment after the earth was without form and void). A tight vacuum sucks in inspiration...if we allow it.
But even artists grow weary when a certain chunk keeps defying their grasp. So if you’re exasperated about having forgotten some trivia, consider the plight of artists, who spend their professional lives in that fuzzy realm.
Remember Like a Dream
Here's a cool shortcut.
Failing to recall a fact - a name, a date, a word - we instinctively strain and bash against the block. But when people try to recall a dream, they go about it very differently. They get a faraway look in their eyes and slip away a little, almost as if falling lightly asleep. We recreate a hazy dream state to access dream information. No one ever flails in frustration to remember a dream. We don't force or rush the remembering. We relax into it! We do it the right way!
(Why? Because there’s no interruption involved. And since we don’t actually mind the forgetting - it’s the interruption that freaks us out - we apply a more effective, more relaxed approach to dream recollection.)
So do that! Frame a forgotten chunk as having occurred in a dream. And then do what you naturally do to remember dreams.
Kudos to the chowhound known as Limster for a fantastically helpful chowhounding tip. It's very specific in its usefulness, but if it suits you, it's a game-changer.
I can't keep everything I know about food in RAM. I'm not Rain Man. I will never have every fact at my fingertips.
Sometimes this becomes painfully obvious. If I haven't eaten, say, Chilean food in a while, and I find myself in a conversation with a Chilean, I might be unable to recall one single thing about the cuisine. It's embarrassing!
Less extreme, but even more mortifying, I'll be ordering at a counter and suddenly blank out the name of the cuisine's most important dish. If I had a dime for every time I've stood before a Gujurati clerk trying to remember the name of the yellow spongey stuff that looks like cornbread and is covered with black mustard seeds and cilantro, I'd have enough money to treat you to a nice dinner of whatever the hell the Japanese call the small, intense square of braised pork in the bottom of the large bowl.
The amnesia also works the other way. Here's an embarrassing secret: I don't recognize roughly half of food terms. Many sound so utterly unfamiliar that I carry a visceral feeling that I've barely eaten at all. I'm a rank newbie. Larva-like and blankly blinking.
Of course, such scenarios drive us to our iPhones for salvation. Wikipedia isn't a great food resource, and web search will mostly cough up results from restaurant menus, which are only occasionally helpful. I (with the aforementioned Limster and others) created an app, "Eat Everywhere", which offers expert guidance in restaurants of unfamiliar cuisine (or familiar ones where you want to go deeper, or order for kids, or for vegetarians, or endear yourself to the waitstaff). But the app was never intended as an encyclopedia of dishes and dish names.
So a few minutes ago, like an idiot, I forgot what agedashi tofu is, even though I've had it a zillion times. So I did what Limster does: a Google image search. And it's like, oh yeah. A total flooding back of memory. I once again own agadeashi tofu, in about two seconds flat:
The best tips in life are gut simple. They're "duh". And this is one of them.
Of course, if you haven't eaten widely, a bunch of photos will only help so much. You still want to know what exactly the dish is. But if you're on the other end of the curve, having eaten widely, and need to briefly cut through the fog of Chowzheimer's, Google image search is salvation.
It also boosts my confidence, reminding me that I've eaten pretty much everything. Even the most unfamiliar-sounding dishes, when I actually see them, always look at least somewhat familiar.
A few postings ago, I offered a tip for adding extra slots to your short term memory. Someone sent me an email asking why I'd described this as a matter of perceptual framing.
The trick, once again, was to memorize only what you can comfortably memorize, and no more. Beyond that limit, just casually look, glance, peer at more data, and you'll find that it will persist; retained via the visual channel, completely outside your limited memorization process.
Once you've memorized all you can memorize the usual way, as you look/glance/peer at additional data you are imperiling the previously stored data. If you don't proceed per my directions - if you view the additional material with even a faint effort to memorize - you'll knock loose the contents of your memory. Instead of implanting in your visual buffer, it will barge destructively into your fully-loaded memory buffer.
So the trick only works if you frame in a very specific way. "I'm glancing at data, but don't care at all if I remember it or not. No memorizing going on here! Just looking, please, ma'am, thanks!" You're a disinterested looky-loo, absolutely not memorizing...though that actually is the objective. Think of it as a benign self-deception.
If you slip out of that framing and make the slightest effort to memorize the additional material, the jenga tower will likely collapse, leaving you with shards of broken memories.
Reframing allows you to enter data into a fresh additional channel, like finding extra space on a different hard drive.
Telephone numbers are 7 digits long because psychologists determined that this is the longest string that can be quickly/easily memorized. Try it:
3428921
Close your eyes. Got it?
You can probably sense that you couldn't juggle too many more bits of data; at least not without investing some effort. But you can use framing to give yourself a memory expansion. I'll show you a trick.
Below is another seven digit number, with some more numbers to the right. Ignore those numbers! Do not memorize them! Invest all your memorization capacity into the seven numbers on the left. Don't be distracted by the rest. Pretend they're not there.
Then, once you've memorized the seven, casually look at the other numbers for a couple of seconds. Don't memorize them. Don't make the slightest effort to process them, or to think about them. Just stare stupidly at them for a couple of seconds. Lay your eyes on them, nothing more. Ok, here goes:
2556298 - 4427
Close your eyes and recall the seven. Then see the remainder. Don't remember them, just see them.
Congrats! You've added four new (fast/easy) memory slots, a 57% upgrade. This is available to you always, in any context.
Want to keep going? Add yet another four by speaking some aloud. Memorize the first seven, visualize (without memorizing) another four, then speak (without memorizing) another four, not just speaking but listening to yourself speak. No furrowed brow or disciplined concentration; just listen, period, while holding on to the previous memorization. Don't drop that package!
The key is to let go of memorization. You can only memorize seven. For more numbers, you need to do something other than memorize.
