Memory: The Thread of Life

Sunday 16 December 2012 5:00PM

Memory – it’s the thread that runs through our lives, but how are our early memories formed? Psychologists are finding that the way we talk with our young children and tell them family stories affects their early memories and their sense of themselves when they become teenagers.

And, why we forget most of what we learn when we cram for an exam. Research suggests that repeated study is not as effective for enduring learning, as regular testing of newly acquired knowledge.

Suparna Rajaram and Elaine Reese were guests of Macquarie University and Keynote Speakers at a Workshop called 'Human Science Perspectives on Scaffolding Memories Across the Lifespan', which was supported by the Faculty of Human Sciences, the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, and the Department of Cognitive Science at Macquarie University

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Lynne Malcolm: Hi, Lynne Malcolm with you. And on All in the Mind today memory, the thread of our lives. If I give you a date in the past could you tell me what day of the week it was? American actor Marilu Henner can.

Marilu Henner: Let’s say 1975, okay, so in 1975 all right, so in 1975 which was a while ago well let’s see, my birthday was on a Sunday that year that was April 6 and Christmas was on a Thursday that year and Thanksgiving was on the 27 you know so it starts to come in, my first date with a boyfriend was August 12th so I start to fill in different days in that year, you know, and different events and when I started on the Broadway show Grease I can go through my entire year for you if you want.

Lynne Malcolm: Marilu Henner has what’s known as superior autobiographical memory.

Suparna Rajaram: What Marilu Henner is able to demonstrate is that on cue it seems as if she can remember every day of her life since she was 4, 5 or 6 years old.

Lynne Malcolm: Suparna Rajaram is professor of psychology at Stonybrook University in New York State and she’s highly respected for her many years in memory research.

Suparna Rajaram: You give Marilu Henner a date and Henner says that she starts to see these videos play in front of her and she sort of sorts through the videos to see which one belongs to that date and it is as if she can replay that day. So it’s a very, very fascinating phenomenon. There are five or six or more recently I think up to twelve individuals who have been publicly recorded to have this unusual ability. But I have to say this is not how we find people generally go about going through their autobiographical or their past memories. People do reconstruct pieces but people don’t have such highly specified and contextualised memories, there are special events that we all remember. How accurately we remember them is open to question because we rehearse them repeatedly and when we rehearse them we embellish them and we add some spice to it and so — but the core events presumably stay there but in Marilu Henner’s case it’s just exceptionally detailed and she says she rehearses memories and she is able to sort them in ways that are quite impressive.

Lynne Malcolm: We’ll hear more about our memory for the past later, particularly how children’s past memories are formed. While Professor Suparna Rajaram is fascinated with people who have extraordinary memory abilities, she draws important insight from studying those who have a memory deficit. Here she relates her encounter with one of these patients.

Suparna Rajaram: This happened a few years ago when I was testing an amnesic patient who suffers from what is known as dense anterograde amnesia, and that is the inability to form new memories. And individuals with that sort of disorder have intact intelligence but they are unable to remember things as they happen from minute to minute. In the process of testing this individual one day I walked in to the testing room and handed him some testing materials and he noticed deep scratch on my arms and my hand. and he wanted to know what that was and I explained to him that I had a newly adopted cat and the cat had been scratching me and I was learning how to negotiate that. And he very helpfully offered to me that I should buy a scratching post and put some catnip on it and I was appreciative and we proceeded with the testing session.

 And then ten minutes later when I walked back in to the room the patient suddenly said, 'What are those scratches on your hand?' And I paused, realising that this is an unusual conversation and so I said I had a newly adopted cat in my home and the cat had been scratching me and the patient then proceeded to say, 'Well you know what you should do, you should get a scratching post and place some catnip on it and then the cat would favour that for scratching rather than you.' And I thanked him and we proceeded with the second part of the session. And then when I came back in to the room I think you can anticipate the conversation...

Lynne Malcolm: It happened again.

Suparna Rajaram: Yes, exactly. So this is the type of conversation that draws home our ability when we do not have such disorders, to travel mentally back and forth in time and be able to connect our present to our past, and vice versa, and to connect our past and future back to the present. And it’s such an amazing ability that we have that draws together the thread of our lives. This is the sort of thread of life that we take for granted and then it breaks. Really life can come to a standstill where we really can’t perform simple functions and people lose jobs and they are aware that they are smart but they are unable to really use their abilities because they cannot really connect morning to the afternoon and afternoon to the evening. And it’s interesting to study not only because it is so striking but because it also gives us a window into the larger architecture of our cognition.

Lynne Malcolm: In the course of investigating memory in relation to our cognitive abilities Suparna Rajaram has done some experimental work on how our memory serves us when we are acquiring new information. For example we’re all familiar with ‘cramming’ just before an exam. Repeated study in a short space of time. Cramming often gets you through the immediate exam but how likely are you to remember that information into the future? Suparna Rajaram says that repeatedly testing yourself holds the key.

Suparna Rajaram: If we want to create more enduring memory for what we have learned, a number of researchers have shown that studying a few times but testing yourself over and over again can really create this kind of long-lasting knowledge. So we wanted to understand why, why is that repeatedly studying something doesn’t endure? It seems so intuitive and it seems effective because we do well in exams after we cram, but the question is six months later can we still have that knowledge at our disposal; and we wanted to understand why is it that this knowledge just dissipates over time.

So in a very detailed set of experiments that we did what we were able to uncover is fascinating. Repeated study does improve retention in the short term. There’s a lot of information that’s retained but it’s not organised very tightly or very efficiently or in ways that its meaning can emerge and become really centralised. But repeated retrieval allows that process to take place where we are able to align what we have just learned to our pre-existing knowledge in a much more efficient way. And those structures are larger in size, they are tighter in size and they don’t splinter over time the way knowledge structures splinter if only repeated study practice was used.

Lynne Malcolm: So what from that what are the implications for the way we might set up learning situations for children perhaps at school?

Suparna Rajaram: I think taking tests is a very good idea, I imagine it would not be a very popular recommendation, when people take repeated tests it seems like a very averse-like thing to do, but having done it once or twice it gets easier, you become a smart test-taker. You also in the process get to retain what you’re learning. So it is important to remember that repeated study in the short run affords a larger amount of retention, and that can fool us into thinking that a larger amount has been retained and so that must be the more effective method. And repeated tests might just home in on a lesser amount, but it helps us get down to the important pieces that we can then hold on to.

So frequent testing is a good idea, and I will go on to say that because every exposure to information creates memories. It’s very important that if students are taking repeated tests, and when they give incorrect answers it’s very important to correct those answers. Because over time students might lose the information on which answer was correct and which was incorrect, they might just remember an answer and that could be a problem. So that is another caveat to how we might go about setting up our educational practice based on this research.

Lynne Malcolm: So when it comes to the ageing brain, does this apply to people who are getting older when naturally their memory is declining somewhat anyway, can this help people learn new information as they get older?

Suparna Rajaram: You actually pose a very good question about how this might interact with ageing, even a normal healthy ageing mind and brain starts to exhibit some deficits in memory and the deficits are largely isolated to the episodic memory deficit — being able to remember day to day things. So could repeatedly rehearsing information help? Here’s the interesting part about repeatedly going over something in your mind that has happened. It’s much more similar to what I call repeated testing, because we go over information by self generating, we think about what had happened all over again by ourselves. So if somebody else tells us what happened it is going to be less effective in terms of holding on to it than if we thought about it ourselves and we were the ones who narrated it over and over again to others.

So could it help with ageing? And I would say it should help because even though there are episodic memory deficits as people get older, one of the less obvious strengths that remain fully intact with ageing is that people organise information just as well as young adults do. So when the ability to organise information is present then rehearsing information is definitely going to pick up on that ability and the two would interact to help.

Lynne Malcolm: Because as you get older you’re exposed to more things, you’ve seen more things, I guess you know more things; you’ve got more things to deal with in your mind, don’t you?

Suparna Rajaram: This is completely true, and this is one of the points that we don’t keep in mind when we get a little bit nervous or frantic about forgetting things. As we get older, as you very correctly pointed out, we just know more; we have so much more information to navigate through in our minds and to be able to get to the right memory, or the right answer, or the right name which is about the worst thing one tries to do as one gets older it gets difficult and we start to interpret that difficulty as oh, I think my memory is not so good anymore. But it’s really not that the memory is not so good it’s just that there’s so many more memories to work with and that can confuse people into thinking that their memories are getting worse. It’s not that there is not some loss, there is the loss in the ability to access information, but the good news is that it’s also because there’s a lot more of it.

Lynne Malcolm: Professor Suparna Rajaram from the Psychology Department at Stonybrook University in New York. And she reinforces the advice we often now hear, use it or lose it, brain exercises such as doing crosswords, Sudoku and learning a new language all can be helpful to protect against the memory decline that’s natural with ageing.

You’re with All in the Mind on ABC Radio National, Radio Australia and online. I’m Lynne Malcolm – today we’re exploring the thread of our lives – memory.

Our personal memory for past events is referred to as autobiographical memory. Elaine Reese is Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Elaine Reese: I think of autobiographical memory as our memory for personally experienced past events, and they can be a memory for a specific past event. For instance one of my earliest memories is of the hot water heater blowing up in a house that we’d just moved in to when I was just three, and my mother grabbing my little sister and me out of the bath and carrying us out on to the front yard of our Texas home. So that’s a memory of a specific past event as opposed to our memories for procedures, or how to do something, like how to ride a bike, or our memory for the capital of a country. Autobiographical memory is a memory that means something to us and it’s personal.

Lynne Malcolm: So why is it important?

Elaine Reese: I think that it’s formative in our sense of self. So if you think about autobiographical memories, no one else has exactly the same set of memories that you have or that I have. It’s what makes us unique as a person.

Lynne Malcolm: Elaine Reese’s interest in autobiographical memory has led her to work on a longitudinal birth cohort study at the University of Auckland – it’s called Growing up in New Zealand. This research began from the time the mothers were pregnant and it’ll follow these children until they are 21 years old. Elaine Reese and her colleagues are focussing on the development of these children’s early language and how that affects them in their teenage years.

Elaine Reese: We’re constantly trying to figure out why we can’t remember anything most of us before around age three and what we are finding is that in a longitudinal study that I’ve been doing in New Zealand with a group of children from the time they first started talking about the past at age one and a half, and now we followed those children through into the teenage years, now they’re 16, what we’re finding is that there are a lot of things coming together in those first few years of life that contribute to their earliest memories. So some of the most important are their sense of self, their self concept, which sort of comes online between about 18 and 24 months for most kids, and also the way parents talk with them about their memories as well as the children’s own language capabilities.

Lynne Malcolm: What influences the way children develop their autobiographical memory in relation to the way adults speak with them?

Elaine Reese: We’re finding that one of the most important things that parents do to help their children’s memory is when they talk with them about their experiences using open ended questions, asking for new information. So for instance say you took your toddler to the zoo and the next day you might ask your toddler what animals did we see at the zoo? And a lot of toddlers won’t say much in response but then if the parent follows up with what animal did we see that gave a big roar, so you’re giving new information in asking these what we call WH questions — about who, where, how questions — that parents who ask more of those kinds of questions. their toddlers grow up to be pre-schoolers who have richer memories.

Lynne Malcolm: So this in a way gives the children some sort of framework to help them lay down their memories?

Elaine Reese: Yes, well we think that one thing that’s happening is it’s giving children a structure for keeping the memory alive. So we think that they’ve already laid down the memory but if parents talk about it after it’s happened then what it’s doing is helping the toddler to put that memory into their own words. And we know that just the act of putting it into language is helping to strengthen that memory soon after it happens, it’s probably helping to consolidate that memory and then that memory will last for longer. So what we’re finding is that the adolescents whose mothers talk to them in this elaborative way in early childhood, they actually have memories that date back to a younger age than adolescents whose mothers didn’t use what we call as elaborative a style of reminiscing.

Lynne Malcolm: So how are you actually testing that?

Elaine Reese: Well we ask the parents to talk with their toddlers and pre-schoolers about past events, things that they’ve recently experienced such as going to the zoo, unique experiences. Then we look at how elaboratively the parent is structuring the talk, how much the toddler is remembering, how much the pre-schooler is remembering at the time. And then when those same children were adolescents, when they were 12 and 16, we brought them back into the lab and we asked them to talk about their earliest memories and then we could see which of those early memories they had forgotten and which ones they still remembered.

Lynne Malcolm: And is there any evidence that if the autobiographical memory is richer by adolescence, then that benefits the young person in other ways besides just having a good memory?

Elaine Reese: Yes, we’ve been working on that with a new group of teenagers ranging in age from 12 to 20. And what we’re finding is that those adolescents whose mothers talked with them in this elaborative way about the past, that they have what we call more coherent memories as adolescents. By coherence I mean that when they’re talking about sometimes difficult events that have happened in their lives, or life changing events, that they are able to talk about them in a more structured way to get some meaning out of that event for who they are. And we know that those young adults who have a more coherent life story, they also have better wellbeing so they have lower rates of depression and anxiety and higher life satisfaction. So it somehow all seems to come together in the late adolescent period as what we’re finding.

Lynne Malcolm: And what influence do events that have emotion connected to them have on the way they’re remembered?

Elaine Reese: Yes, emotion...of course memories aren’t just about what happened, a lot of what we’re talking about when we’re remembering significant events is about the emotional impact of those events. It’s interesting because one’s earliest memories are often not about highly emotional experiences, often they’re about fairly mundane experiences such as oh, a minor fall at pre-school or something like that. My early memory of the furnace blowing up is a little bit unusual in that way because it was quite a significant event. But parents are also talking about the emotions in past events and we’re finding that parents who talk about why we have certain negative reactions to past events, and this is Karen Salmon’s work and Penny van Bergen’s work, finding that when you teach mothers to talk about emotions in a more explanatory way with pre-schoolers that they actually have better understanding of emotions later on. And of course this understanding of emotions can help in all sorts of ways later on for teenagers; it can help them cope with stressful events.

Lynne Malcolm: In another study called Origins of Memory,  funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand at the University of Otago, Elaine Reese and her team are also looking at the role that telling family stories plays in the development of these children’s memories.

Elaine Reese: So unlike a child’s autobiographical memory, the family stories are a little bit different because a lot of them are about events that the child didn’t personally experience. So one popular one is telling the story of the child’s birth and that can be a really positive family story, talking about how the child came into this world, into this family and all the people who were so glad to welcome that child. So I advocate to parents that that’s a really positive family story that even very young children are very interested in. So in one study that we did one mother of a four-year-old reported that she had told her child’s birth story 50 times because he kept asking for it. As children get older parents can start to tell stories about when they were young. And you’ll know it’s working if they ask to hear the same family story again. Or if you can think of a story from your own childhood that might help a child cope with a particular problem that they’re having in their lives right now.

Lynne Malcolm: Because I suppose each time you tell the same story the kids are at a different stage of development so it’s meaning something a bit different and gets richer as the time goes on.

Elaine Reese: Yes, and you can add to it and provide more details over time and they will be interested in different aspects of it. And some family stories are just fun and funny, such as we hear about a lot of family misadventures on holiday, so we’ve got some great stories about rushing to catch the plane to Singapore, and the nappies all came out of the bag...and families retell those stories just for fun but I think they also have a bonding function for the family and they can really pull families together that yes, we got through that hard time and we made it through as a family.

Lynne Malcolm: And you’ve also done some cross-cultural study too; tell me what you found there and the differences...

Elaine Reese: Well I was drawing upon some work there that Arlene Hayne and her student Shelly MacDonald did on how young adults who are Maori have some of the earliest memories of any culture ever studied.

Lynne Malcolm: And how early is that?

Elaine Reese: On average about two and a half, which is quite a bit earlier than in European, mostly it’s between about three and three and a half. We were interested in how the parents of course were talking with their children about the past, and Shelly MacDonald had some families participating in her research, some Maori families with pre-schoolers and school age children, and what we found is that the Maori parents were talking about the past especially about family stories such as the birth story in a much richer way compared to how they were talking about more routine every day past events, and in comparison to the European parents. And especially they were using more references to time and sometimes telling more emotional stories and that’s going to be more memorable for the children.

Lynne Malcolm: Along with looking at other cultural groups in New Zealand Elaine Reese and her colleagues are finding that Italian teenagers who’ve grown up in extended households could be benefiting from more interaction and family stories from their grandparents, which may lead to earlier memories. So the message is talk to your kids in an elaborative way from the word go and don’t hold back with the family stories.

But something unexpected has been observed in a group of young teenagers which Elaine Reese is keen to follow up in future research.

Elaine Reese: One puzzling finding that I’d like to explore more is with younger adolescents we are finding that the adolescents who tell the more coherent stories actually have higher rates of depression and this is with, say, 12- to 14-year-olds. We think what’s happening is that when young adolescents are first starting to make meaning out of life events and trying to connect all these things that have happened to them and trying to figure out what it means for themselves, they’re not really completely ready to do that, I think they still need parents' help in structuring the things that are happening to them. So one thing I’m really interested in doing is trying to find some way to help parents talk with their young adolescents, especially about the negative things that have happened to them and to help them find some way of coping, because we know that’s when a lot of young adolescents start to experience depression symptoms for the first time. So it’s something that I feel quite strongly about, having two adolescents myself — 12 and 16 — and I’d really like to know if there’s some way that family storytelling can help.

Lynne Malcolm: So perhaps there is an argument for family storytelling to be important consistently right through?

Elaine Reese: Yes, probably it’s going to be important in different ways for children at different ages. So with the really young children we know it’s important for their language development, their storytelling and for their memory, and I think as children get older and as we find out more, we’ll find that it’s very important for their self-esteem and self-concept and their wellbeing.

Lynne Malcolm: Elaine Reese, associate professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

That’s all for today, head to the All in the Mind website for details from today’s show where you can listen to past programs as well. While you’re there leave a comment. Why not share your earliest memories and continue the conversation on the All the Mind Facebook page and Twitter as well.

Today’s sound engineer was Michelle Goldsworthy, I’m Lynne Malcolm, thanks for your company, bye for now.


Suparna Rajaram
Professor of Psychology and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Personnel
Stony Brook University, New York
Elaine Reese
Associate Professor, Department of Psychology
University of Otago, New Zealand
Education Domain leader for the national birth cohort study, Growing up in New Zealand


Lynne Malcolm

Comments (7)

Add your comment

  • MJC :

    16 Dec 2012 8:45:44pm

    I remember:
    -my sister's birth (I was 2 yrs 1 month.) I was given a chocolate cake to "celebrate." I have always hated chocolate cake.
    -my sister's christening. (I was 2 years 4 months) Much fuss beforehand.
    -our ancient car's brakes failed and I (with my sister in a bassinet)in the car, watched as our mother tried to stop it rolling down our steep driveway. Our mother was dragged through the rosebushes. The car stuck on the gatepost. After we were back in the house I gave her a face flannel to wipe the blood off her legs while she cried. I was about 2 and a half I think.

    Perhaps early memories are fixed if they are sufficiently memorable?

  • Jim :

    17 Dec 2012 5:12:44pm

    I surprised myself with how good my memory is last year when I was posting some old school photos onto a social networking site. I'm now 55 and I remembered all but one of the names of the kids that I went to primary school with in my old school photos. There are about 45 different students in the photos.

    I have come a long way as my mum used to always telling that I have a memory like a sieve when I was a kid.

  • Jim :

    17 Dec 2012 5:20:47pm

    Also, sometimes I listen to podcasts of RN programs as I'm driving on the roads. Occasionally I will be at home listening to a repeat of the program that I heard when I was driving. At certain parts into the program, images of the section of road I was at when driving come spontaneously into my head. Listening to the program second time around triggers my visual memory of my surrounds when the program was first heard. Other wise I usually wouldn't even think of my past road journeys without the audible trigger.

  • Allan Gardiner :

    23 Dec 2012 11:24:27pm

    One anomaly that I have always found to be quite amazing[and humorous] is when a person -- even myself on occasion it's been said but I firmly deny anything of the sort -- has been trying to bring something to mind from their past and they say that they're unable to do it, by quoting those two very familiar words, "I forget". I might ask a friend to tell me once again a joke that he'd told me about a month before. He'll remember that he did in fact tell me a joke at that time and he may well even remember that it was a joke not to be told in polite company, but as for the joke per se, nix! But one thing that these folk can always be assured of remembering is that they never ever forget to utter those two words: "I forget".

    If you know that should know something, because you know that you did know it at one time in your life to the extent that you'd willingly swear a solemn oath that you at one time did in fact know it, then why not at least fake it till you make it come to mind, instead of further suppressing it from a redolently reticent recollection by saying, "I forget" where was I? Oh yeah...

    Methinks there's a lot to be said for "maieutics", which is based on the concept that the "truth" is latent in the mind of every human being due to innate reason, but has to *given birth* by answering intelligently proposed questions(or problems). Maieutics derives from Greek and pertains to *midwifery*.

    By carefully posing questions to a slave who never learnt geometry, Socrates, acting as a spiritual midwife, coaxed him to "remember" how a square is doubled. Even though I wasn't there eons ago when Socrates performed this amazing feat, I can most easily pictu_re'coll_ect'opically his servile student slaving away racking his brains for the seemingly elusive answ_er'umpent-up ins_ide'ological!

  • Allan Gardiner :

    30 Dec 2012 7:39:51am

    According to Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik: "We remember better that which is p_un'finished..err..unfinished or incomplete"[see "The Zeigarnik effect"], so, when examinations loom, give yourself an edge by keeping yourself sharply on-edge so that you'll be able to cut-it on the big day, per holding yourself in a state of suspense beforehand, and just try to picture in your mind memorially that everything will go off smoothly...without A[lfred] Hitch_cock-up!

  • Dr K :

    20 Feb 2013 9:27:56pm

    I have retrograde amnesia due to head trauma Oct 31st 1986. Wish this made sense to me. I have no recollection whatsoever of my childhood.

  • Genevieve Murray :

    30 Apr 2014 9:20:56am

    My earliest memory is of waking in a sun filled bedroom and seeing a mote filled shaft of sunlight washing over a golden teddy bear at the top of a red net Christmas stocking on the end of my bed. When I related this memory to mum she said it was impossible that I could remember this as I was only 18 months old, so I went on to describe to her the blue lino with pink roses and green ribbons that covered the floor . She was shocked and confirmed the unusual colour arrangements of the floor coverings in our nursery.