Travel memories

A log rests precariously on the edge of a rocky ledge. I took this photo while traveling through British Colombia last week. The area is part of Francis Point Provincial Park, wilds that have only been open to the public for a few years. They feel raw, undisturbed by humans, elemental.

How memory worksBut what happened in my brain when I saw the log, and what in addition had to happen for me to remember it? The simple answer is a network of neurons fired and a memory was born. But memories are not available for retrieval like items left in a locker at the train depot. Retrieving the memory requires the repeat firing of the same network of neurons. These neurons are spread all over the cortex with no single commander telling them when to fire. We now know that “neurons that fire together, wire together,” but how do we get a mass of neurons to fire together again without repeat exposure to what made them fire in the first place? It’s not like we can carry around a set of flashcards, like foreign language students, drilling our brains to recall our favorite memories. Viewing a photo can help evoke a memory or taking the time to write about something in a journal or blog, or yes, even tweet about it. These all help. But how does the brain remember one-time events without such memory devices?

Memory is making connections
Memory is making connections, linking one thing to another. Much of this linkage is subconscious and we preserve memories of events that can be activated by encountering something as simple as a smell. Re-encountering a smell that was part of an original sensory experience can cause the entire network of neurons involved in the memory to fire. Thus when I smell old wallpaper, I often recall sleeping in my Grandma’s house the week before she died in a bedroom with rose wallpaper and a white crocheted coverlet.

The brain's ability to form and retain connections makes comprehension possible. To a mind that cannot make connections (as studies on epilepsy and amnesia patients have shown) each instant is an isolated event without continuity, each thought fleeting and unrelated, each precept without relevance, each person a stranger, every event unexpected. No connections between the past, present and future would be like living a life with total amnesia.

Connecting an event to our life story makes it memorableSo memories are strings of neurons that fire together. But what’s interesting to me is the role our life stories play in what we remember and what we forget? Encounters become memorable when we link them to something known. We use phrases like “I put two and two together,” or “Fill in the dots” to describe how one thing gets linked to another in our minds. A life story is a valuable tool for organizing and connecting otherwise random events. You could think of your life story as a substrate upon which new memories are built. This substrate contains themes and characters, even expected plot twists and endings. When we connect a current event to a known theme or a known character, the new event is remembered. But there’s a drawback to this helpful memory aid. We often ignore the ways in which the new events or the new people are unique, different from what we’ve previously encountered.

Every new event has novel elements
A 2009 experiment by psychologist Daniel L. Schacter of Harvard showed that neuronal firing in the brain is different every single time a subject experiences an event, even when the circumstances are quite similar. Our brains have evolved to not only link things together through an ongoing narrative, but also to see what’s different this time around. To me that means, no matter how important our life stories are, they are not us. We can continue to see through them, around them. We can draw apart the veil they cast over our current experience and direct our attention to what’s different. To me, this is the true power of "living in the now."

Attention allows us to shape our life stories
The ability to direct our attention allows us to continue to shape our life stories throughout our lives. We are not stuck with some scratched record that keeps playing the same line of a song over and over. We can use our life stories to make sense of new events while also using our attention to expand our stories through those events. The story provides general categories (themes) and our ongoing experiences provide the ability move beyond the general and perceive differences. These perceived differences can then lead to new categories (new themes). For example, a general theme that “men cannot be trusted,” can benefit from the brain's ability to discriminate differences leading to “some men cannot be trusted, but Tim can.”

Working backwards
Once we know that neurons anchor life experiences by connecting them to our life stories (with their themes and characters and expected endings), we can expand our life experience. All we need to do is to look for what's different. If you have a story about so-and-so being unreliable, you can ask your brain to look for at least three instances in which so-and-so was actually reliable. If you have a story about never being lucky, you can ask your brain to find at least three instances in which you were the lucky one. Soon, instead of seeing all life events as unlucky, you’ll begin to notice that there is always more going on, always more you could turn your attention to, should you choose to do so. This is the gift of attention. I, for one, choose to turn my attention towards thoughts that feel good. When I'm distressed, I look for thoughts that feel kind, thoughts that feel accepting, thoughts that feel peaceful. I can always find a better feeling thought.

How are you directing your attention?

My thanks to Anthony Greene, Associate Professor of Psychology at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee for helping me shape these thoughts. Pr. Greene runs a learning and memory lab.

How our life stories impact our reality

A life story is a running narrative that impacts the present by filtering perceptions, highlighting certain sensory impressions and subordinating others. But a life story does more than influence our perception of the present. A life story also reshapes our memory of the past and our anticipation of the future.

Why we need a life story
We use this running narrative to place any single live event within the flux of an entire lifetime of events. We use it to decide what that individual event means—what it means about who we are, how we relate to others and what life holds in store for us. Without an ongoing narrative, each event would be spliced up and floating, sans context, in a meaningless sea of other bits and pieces.

Life stories come from the left hemisphere
New brain research can now show us (through fMRI scans, stroke victim research and split-brain re-search) that it is the left hemisphere of the brain that is the storyteller. The left hemisphere wants to string things together into a linear pattern, while the right hemisphere tries to observe the whole at once. In other words, our life story considers a distorted portion of our external reality, and is not built around some true representation of “the way things are.”

The way things are
In their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann argue that all knowledge, including the most basic, taken-for-granted common sense knowledge of everyday reality, is derived from and maintained by social interactions. This theory, later extrapolated as social constructivism, can help us understand socially what brain research shows neurologically. Objective reality is a slippery slope, and what we see, think and feel is a construction of pieces rather than a given whole.

We have to believe it to see it
We have all heard the expression, “I’ll have to see it to believe it.” In large measure, the opposite is true. We have to believe something is possible before we can see its manifestation in the world around us. As Paul Simon said, “A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest.” This is a literal description of how our eyes see. Our eyes take in sensory impressions, but from perceiving to seeing, the information our eyes relay is translated into “mental inventions.” The neurons in our brains respond to these mental inventions, and only after this translation has occurred does the image become conscious. Our underlying beliefs about what we’re seeing, based upon our interpretations of past experience, factor into the mental invention stage of seeing before we are even conscious that we are seeing anything at all. Basically, we don’t get a conscious say in what we decide to see. Vision is automatic, yes, but it’s also constructed—each and every glimpse.

Do you see the smiley face in the photo of the moon and stars or in the plant photo at the beginning of this post? Your ability to form mental categories is what allows you to think of it as a smiley face. In the same way you see a smiley face when there is no face at all, you also see representations of bits of your life story everywhere you go and in every interaction you have.

The life story’s greatest gift
A life story bestows a hugely important gift on each of us. It gives us a sense of self. We use our running narratives to perceive things as happening to a single consciousness. No story line, no sense of self. But stories of all kinds are by nature limiting. By placing a frame around our perceptions, they keep some in and others out. That’s why careful examination of the tone, themes, and buried beliefs in our life stories has rare value. I teach a life stories class for the University of Utah’s Lifelong Learning program that steps participants through this discovery process and would like to open up a similar online exploration. If you are interested in meeting with an group to explore your life story, please feel free to contact me at Sharon@newinkcopy.com.

The concept comes first

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Concepting is the most demanding part of my job. A concept is not a design, not a visual, and not text. It's an idea that brings all those elements together with seemingly effortless grace. Clients and readers must get it in a glance. It can require no thought, but must be clever enough to catch attention. Like I said, it's the most demanding part of my job.

Target moms was the concept for the XIGO product launch. 
The day begins. The creative director makes a simple statement. "We need a concept for this piece." What he means is, go knock your brains out and come up with no less than 40 original, creative ideas for how to communicate the story of this brand.. product... offering, etc. He's been doing this a long time. He knows it's not going to be the 7th idea, or even the 27th that moves forward. It's usually somewhere around 38 or 39 that I finally get an idea with enough juice to carry a brand--or a brochure--or an ad.

The concept seems obvious after the fact. One of the best tests of a good concept is that, once you come up with it, it seems so obvious. Of course this is the way to convey this message. Of course this is our brand story. How could it be anything else? It speaks to the heart of what the client is trying to convey. And when you're lucky enough to hit the bulls eye, the client may even think they came up with it, it's that "right on."

The concept is not a training manual. Concepts are simple. They require no explanation beyond a headline, or at most, a subhead. Their purpose is not to educate the reader on the ins and outs of a business. No one should need to read the body copy to understand a concept, or have the clever meaning behind the concept explained to them. As a former university teacher, I often forget about this rule. I want to explain. I want to lay it out for my reader why this concept is so cool, if you just think about it this way. To guard against this "teacher tendency," I make myself scan my list of concepts on the printed page and ask, "Would they get it in a glance?" If not, it hits the trash.

The concept cannot wander off. Often I'll come up with a killer concept. It really gets the message across. Then I realize, yes, it's getting the message across, but it's not the right message. Sigh. I've been carried deeper into the forest, following creative breadcrumbs only to realize I've lost the original message. I had it somewhere back at the beginning, but I went astray. There's nothing to do but tuck your igeniuous, irrelevant message away for future use and return to the beginning of the path.

When a concept works, your reader remembers it. They think about it while jogging the next day. They have a little chuckle. Their brain automatically pulls up the image you linked with the copy and registers a positive emotion. You've done it. You've married a brand to an emotional response. You've raised recognition. You've engendered loyalty. You've sparked interest to know more. Congratulations, you can now call yourself a "concepter."

6 million moments

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A "psychological moment" in your life lasts about three seconds. That means you'll experience (excluding sleep) about 6 million moments in a month; 20,000 in a day. How many of these will you remember? Very few. The rest will simply disappear, wisps of clouds that slowly give way to the mental equivalent of a blue sky.

The tyranny of the remembering self
The only way we get to "keep" any moment of our lives is to store it in memory. It is our "remembering self" that determines what we remember and how we remember it. So what criteria does your remembering self use to determine what to keep and what to forget? It uses your life story. According to Daniel Kahnemann (Nobel laureate and psychologist), our ongoing life narrative sits in tyranny over our experiencing self, filtering and shaping our experience to fit our story's form. If I tell myself a story that I must defend myself against rejection from others, I filter my encounters against this story line, remembering what fits and forgetting what doesn't. If I tell myself a story that I am quite happy in my life and have everything I need, I also filter accordingly.

One sensational minute
For the next minute, widen your awareness to bring to consciousness as many of the sensations flooding through your body to your brain as you can. What can you see? What do you hear? What do you feel on your feet or between your fingers or under your skin? Is there a taste in your mouth? Although it can be exhilarating for the short term, opening to the rush of sensations for longer periods of time overwhelms consciousness. To guard against this overhwhelm, our brains filter our sensations. In other words, our stories keep us sane. It's interesting to note, however, that this filtering occurs before we are conscious of it. Most of what we experience remains forever lost to our conscious minds. In fact, about 98% of what you experience, you won't remember.

The good and the bad news
What are you choosing to remember? Are you focusing on finding a way to share yourself with the world? Are you focusing on how everyone you meet sooner or later dissapoints you? Are you focusing on how anchored and grounded you feel in nature? The good news is that whatever you focus on is what you'll remember and these memories will reinforce your "story filter" for future encounters. That's also the bad news.

Can you change your story?
You can change any story line that's causing you distress. How? Pretend that the opposite belief is true. Maybe that means "pretending" that people are trustworthy, that things do go your way, or that your life is simple and peaceful. And, here's the fun part. Spend a day living "as if" this belief were true for you. Consciously look for proof that this new thought is true. Go hunting for new experiences that contradict your old story line. You may find, as promised by Thich Nhat Hanh, that "we have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize."