Meanings for Memory – Have you been Paying Attention?

Have you been Paying Attention?

There is a common myth that we absorb everything around us, like a GoPro always recording. Then when we forget things, it is because we lost the file. But that is only part of the story.

Where it comes apart is that we don’t actually absorb everything. For us to commit something to memory, we need to pay attention to it.

If we go to the filing cabinet analogy, not everything gets put in the filing cabinet. Just the things we choose. We take something worth remembering, we code it and then we file it. If we don’t choose to put it in the file cabinet, chances are, it probably won’t end up in there.

Who is on the $20 note? You have probably seen the note many times. But can you even actually picture the person’s face? I can’t. Because you didn’t pay attention to it. You didn’t put it into your filing cabinet.

What adds to this, is that you can only really pay attention to one thing at a time. Some people will argue that they can multi-task. What you are actually doing is switching between tasks. Albeit, very quickly.

There is a now famous (probably thanks to YouTube) experiment that demonstrated this perfectly.

https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo

For those who haven’t seen it have a look…also…spoiler alert! In the experiment, participants were asked to watch a video in which players passed a basketball around. The participants were asked to count how many times the ball was passed. Easy enough, right?!  Wrong! Like most evil psychological experiments, they was a twist. And this twist came in the form of a gorilla. Not a real gorilla but a person in a gorilla suit who walked into the scene, danced around waving its arms around and then walked off. You would thing that a guy in a gorilla suit would be really easy to see? Nope, many participants didn’t even see it. I am ashamed to say, I’m pretty sure I missed it on the first go to. They were so focused on the one task of counting the passes they missed a dancing gorilla! The power of attention.

How many times have you introduced yourself to someone and not remembered their name straight after. Did you forget their name? The chances are you probably didn’t even learn it in the first place. If you are like me, you were probably too busy trying to work out how to introduce yourself, if you are going to shake their hand, calming nerves associated with meeting someone etc.

Thus, one way to remember names better is to pay more attention when you introduce yourself. Although, don’t make the mistake I made and simply say the person name when you shake their hand. Sounds like a good idea but it can often end up a bit awkward. Say, I met a guy called ‘Bob’. I’d shake their hand and say ‘Bob’ only to get the response, ‘Oh, your name is Bob too!’. Like I said…awkward. 

This failure to pay attention is also usually how we ended up misplacing our keys, or forgetting where we parked the car.

Thus, attention is vitally important in remembering because it is where it starts. If we don’t put the file in the file cabinet, how will we find it later?!

Photo by TommL/iStock / Getty Images