Mundane Moments Are Made More Memorable When They’re Tied to Emotionally Meaningful Events
Our days are packed with the mundane. We wake up, pick out our clothes, and commute to work or school. We make our dinners; we do our dishes; and we put ourselves to bed. Sometimes these moments are stored in our memories, and sometimes they aren’t. But why do our brains bother to save some of what we would normally regard as not worth remembering?
According to recent research in Science Advances, mundane moments are turned into stronger memories when they occur before or after events that are surprising, satisfying, or emotionally salient. Find your favorite t-shirt that you thought you lost or receive a heartfelt letter from an old friend, and your surrounding actions are strengthened in your brain, whether you were simply finishing your laundry or paying your credit card bill.
“Memory isn’t just a passive recording device,” said Robert M.G. Reinhart, a study author and an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, in a press release. “Our brains decide what matters, and emotional events can reach back in time to stabilize fragile memories.”
According to Reinhart, the results help reveal how our minds work, while also providing fodder for future interventions in education and clinical psychology.
“Developing strategies to strengthen useful memories, or weaken harmful ones, is a longstanding goal in cognitive neuroscience,” he added. “Our study suggests that emotional salience could be harnessed in precise ways to achieve those goals.”
Read More: What Happens in Your Brain When You Make Memories?
Everyday Events and Meaningful Moments
For years, scientists have debated how we remember the little things in life — the time of day it was when we received our first job offer, the meal we ate after signing our first lease. But the findings so far have been inconclusive, revealing mixed results on whether our memories of mundane moments are retroactively or proactively enhanced by our recollection of more meaningful events.
To settle this debate, Reinhart and his team analyzed the results of 10 separate studies, including a total of around 650 participants. In some of these studies, the participants were shown images of animals and tools, for instance, and were asked to identify the images for rewards. Then, the participants were prompted to take a memory assessment, testing their recollection of the images after a 24-hour period.
Read More: Understanding Memory Recall and Storage in the Brain
Memory Prioritization
Taken together, the results revealed a “graded prioritization” in the participants’ minds, which stabilized different moments in different ways. For example, retroactively enhanced memories (or the memories of mundane events that occurred before a salient event) were stronger if the mundane and salient occurrences shared similar sensory traits, while proactively enhanced memories (or the memories of mundane events that occurred after a salient event) were solidified when the salient occurrence was especially emotional or rewarding.
“For the first time, we show clear evidence that the brain rescues weak memories in a graded fashion,” said Chenyang “Leo” Lin, another study author and a Ph.D. student at Boston University, in the release. “It’s not just timing that matters, but also conceptual overlap.”
Read More: How The Brain Decides Which Memories To Keep And Which To Discard
Making the Most of the Mundane
Surprisingly, the results also showed that the strengthening of the mundane was stronger the more mundane it was. “The brain seems to prioritize fragile memories that would otherwise slip away,” Reinhart added in the release.
According to the researchers, the findings help us understand how we make memories and save them, and they set the stage for future solutions in educational and clinical settings.
“The discovery has broad implications for both theory and practice,” Reinhart said in the release. “In education, pairing emotionally engaging material with fragile concepts could improve retention. In a clinical setting, we could potentially rescue memories that are weak, way back in the recesses of our mind, because of normal aging, for example. You can flip it, too, for people with trauma-related disorders — maybe you don’t want to rescue a distressing memory.”
The result could allow us to take more control over our memories — the mundane and the meaningful — to strengthen what we want to remember, and to leave behind the rest.
Article Sources
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