How Your Memory Works
When I ask you what your phone number is, you’ve got that super close, nice and bright, easy to retrieve.
But When I ask you to remember the name of your favorite school teacher, you have to stretch a little bit, but you are eventually being able to retrieve it, throw it into your conscious mind and remember it.
If I ask you to tell me when you last saw a hamster, you will scan this bright memories and you won’t find it. The last time you saw a hamster is probably way out and lurking in some dark part of your brain. It’s there but it is irretrievable and what is scary, is you don’t even know that you can’t remember it. You can’t remember that you can’t remember it. You saw a hamster at some point in your life, but it’s gone.
The vast majority of your life, the thousands of days you have spent on this Earth are memories you can’t retrieve with exception to really important memories that you can retrieve pretty easily, like the first time you left the country, or the day you met your significant other, or the day you broke your wrist. But most of this stuff is totally irretrievable, which is totally fine don’t get me wrong. You probably don’t care to remember that time you bumped your knee on the door of your friend’s apartment. What about that gathering of friends that you had that same month, where the conversation was flowing and the food was so good and you felt alive and excited about life?
To me that’s worth remembering. Like what was the best experience you had in April 2019? What made you happy that month ? You have no idea. And maybe you don’t care to know what happened in April 2019, but I do.
I think it’s a travesty that so much of our life is simply forgotten. I want my memory with bright spots, not just being the memorable trips I went on, but also much mundane experiences. The thing that happened to me years and years ago. What if I can somehow remember simultaneously the memorable stuff? Like the first time I wandered through Rio de Janeiro? And the mundane, but special stuff, like that time I went to the park and I had like really amazing day. That was a special day to me and I want to remember it.
I have been thinking about this predicament for many years and developing workflows and processes and ways I can photo and video to create a world where I can retrieve memories. I wanna share with you some of the guiding principals that I use, the workflow, the software, and the philisophies that I use to do this. And hopefully if you are interested, you can start to construct similar world of memories.
Solving this issue has to do with your cell phone. You have got this amazing camera of your cell phone all the time, bit you have probably noticed that solution isn’t just to take a bunch of photos. The familiar situations is you take a bunch of photos of things you probably wanna remember and then you have so many photo just sitting around on your phone and you don’t really know what to do with them. You never even end up looking at them. It is the the greatest paradox of digital photography and it is really easy to get out of control.
My Approach to this photos involves, but it does not involve only taking photos of everything you wanna remember.
Secondly, I have to say that my approach to this is influenced by research that’s been done on what happen to our brain when we take a picture of something. If you are walking along the cliffsides of maybe Lima, Peru, and you pull out you camera to take a photo, something happens in your brain. Your brain start recording less of the no sensational visuals around you. So that bird that’s hanging out nest to you, or the sound of the ocean or the traffic, or the smell. In short the more immersive the experience of being in a place. Instead you brains hones in on the visual aspect of the scene.
So, If a year later, someone asks you what Lima, Peru is like, you will probably have a better visual memory of your experience there, but you won’t remember what you were feeling, you won’t remember the general experiences. You will remember the thing that you took a photo of.
Okay, you probably done reading this article about the theory behind how I do this and a abroad research and all that. Now let me show you how I actually do this. The key to remember your life is deleting photos. Okay? … I am gonna say that again. The key to remember your life is deleting photos.
The antithesis to remembering your life is too many photos. You take a lot of photos some of them you actually don’t need. Having them in you world without you actually wanting them will cause more stress than joy. Get used to deleting photos often.
I haven’t reviewed all the many, many software that exist out there to do this sort of thing. The one thing I can say is that you want a software that when you take a photo with your phone, it immediately uploads it to the internet and downloads it to your computer. So that any photo you add to your computer or you take with your phone you have them on both devices. I know Google photos does this, Apple photos does this, Lightroom photo does this. I am sure it is becoming more and more of a standard feature for all the photo software so that it shouldn’t be had to find.
The reason you want to do this, is because the first step is actually to get handle of all your pictures and having them on one central library. In this process of deleting photos and making that a habit, you get the first benefit of this system, which is you will be looking at your photos more often. It seem like work, but it is actually an effort that has reward and helps you to relive the memories you had and reduce clutter at the same time. If that photo doesn’t do something to you brain, chemistry, get rid of it.
Just remember the mantra so far, the key to remembering your life is deleting photos. okay, so we have talked about the technology and kind of the workflow. What about when you’re in a beautiful place? What if you in Porto, Portugal, which is one of my favorite city right now, by the way, and it is sunset and this view and you want to document it and remember that evening and the buzz in the air.
How do you document that place and that memory in a way that will help you relive that moment later in your life? Back to the research I earlier mentioned, when you are taking a photo of something, you are making a little of a trade off. You are enhancing you visual memory, but you are sacrificing some of the sensory memories of the smell, and the vibe and the emotional experiences of being there. There is a local music being played, there is a smell of the summer in the air. There is just a vibe of excitement and relaxation that you can’t capture with a camera
After you have taken a bunch of photos, just put the camera away and let your brain do the documenting. You have the visual information saved in photos. Now it is time for your brain to capture the other sensory information, the smell, the breeze, the sound, all of that experiences you can’t capture with your camera. The photo you took will be put under your computer. I’ll delete probably 80–90% of it, keep just 17 pictures from last night of the hundreds that I took and those photographs will serve as a link, a gateway to that memory. And it hopefully spark in my brain, all of the other sensory information that I experienced that night.
Okay, so now, it’s time for what I say it the payoff of all of this. If you are intentional in your efforts to cool down and delete photos and to be in moments when you’re in moments, and let those sink into your brain and capture them as well . If you do all this intentional labor, now you are in the amazing position to be able to what I call explore your memory. To go back and spark those moments and those feelings again.
So, You can do this in several ways. But the way I choose to do it is to go into Apple photos, where I have all of my photos in one catalog and zoom out. You can zoom out to years, which is basically the entire map of all the photos year by year. Pick a year. 2019, We went driving in Florida to look at some manatees. I totally forgotten about that experience until right when I started deleting those photos.
So that is effectively the general approach to how I think about documenting my life. It maybe simple, take photos and organize them. But there is some foundational concepts in there that I think people miss on that make a huge difference. So to review, find a good photo software that sync your photos to the internet and your devices, so you have a backup and have them easily accessible on both devices. This will lead you to deleting your photos, deleting, deleting. Only keep the ones that spark memory.
When you go on trips or you’re in places that you really want to remember, have some camera free time. Put your camera away and try to document the experience with your brain only. This paired with intentional photographing of that place, will later lead to more immersive memories and a better way to relive those experiences in a way that isn’t just visual but it sensory generally.
And finally, the payoff. Don’t forget to do all those steps to then explore your memories, spend time going through those old photos and remember why you kept them. This help you come to terms with the fact that everything is temporary and it passes away, and changes, and that thing that seam like a really big deal, that are stressful now, probably won’t be stressful in 2 or 3 years later when you scrolling through the photos from today.
