Memory #

Aka, leveraging what’s come before to moderate and forecast #

Memory is important. It affects our decisions, help us make sense of the world, and provide a window into meaning and context regardless of the density of information available or consumable. Our stories, laws, and religious and mythological texts are shared deep memory.

How memory is constructed biologically is fascinating. How it’s used, abused, skewed and shared might be one of the cornerstones of what builds our cultures. But when it comes to the nitty gritty, single-entity use?

The big thing to remember about memory as we move through the world is that what memory is pinged is the memory that’s leveraged to make sense of life in a snap. Where and when and how those memories surface when, how, where, and with whom they do is something we're bare able to approach.

Just in terms of this book, memory is complicit in 25 other concepts, from ideas as intuitive as learning, to confounding as being part of our future-sense.

The important part about memory is that it happens. It is used. We use the past to make sense of the present and move towards the future. We use the past by leveraging memory.

Memory helps us repeat successes. It helps us troubleshoot problems by referring to previous instances of both failure and success. It is the most available information at any given moment. 

In navigation, we primarily model according to what can be kept in short term memory without much focus. We leverage chunking so context can help with memory-building, and information scent to alternate spark memory and not need to depend on it as much. 

There are several memory-adjacent cognitive biases (yes, even the tools list is intertwingled!), and it’s even one of Buster Benson’s categories (What should we remember?).

Memory is fungible. We will confabulate memory with what makes sense with the little (sometimes atomic-sized) information we’re sure about. We’ll change memory to fit better with our core precepts, and repetition is the most likely way to get into memory. Remember that the next time you’ve seen the same ad for the tenth time. It’s not that there’s nothing else available, but that whoever bought that ad space is trying to make sure it’s repeated so often you just ‘know’ it, and stop questioning how or from where.

The other sure way to get something into memory is trauma. The higher the trauma, the more possible it is to block memory until it’s sparked; but once it’s sparked, it’s clear and undeniably present.