Have you ever been getting ready for work in the morning and find that you have absolutely no idea if you’ve taken your vitamin (or washed your face, or some other repetitive task that you do every day)? It happens to me regularly, and it turns out there’s a reason.

According to Gary Marcus’s new book Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, context is “one of the most powerful cues affecting our memory.” So, if you learn something in a classroom, you’re more likely to remember it in a classroom. If you smelled lavender while memorizing a list of words, lavender will help you recall them. (Study after study proves it.)

It turns out that the more contextual clues you have about something, the easier it is to remember. But that also means that the things we do most often, and have the most cues for, are strongest and tend blend into each other. That’s why I can’t remember to take my vitamin.

According to Marcus, “What we remember and what we forget are a function of context, frequency and recency…” Memory prioritizes. The things we’ve thought about recently are easiest to remember. This is the reasoning behind something like the Noguchi filing system, which organizes files according to how recently we’ve accessed them.

The brain works much like the Noguchi system. Says Marcus, “For our ancestors, who lived almost entirely in the here and now (as virtually all nonhuman life forms still do), quick access to contextually relevant memories of recent events or frequently occurring ones helped navigate the challenges of seeking food or avoiding danger.”
The solution is something pilots know: checklists help with repetitive tasks. Can you imagine flying every day for weeks at a time? Would you remember every step of the takeoff procedure?

When checklists aren’t practical, we need to arrange our lives to compensate for our weaknesses in memory. Take a look in my car’s glove compartment and my office desk drawer. You’ll find vitamins there.

Tags: Cognitive Science, Jennifer George //