Build a digital memory
“I’m working on expanding subjective time so that it feels like I live longer,” Ed had mumbled to me… “The idea is to avoid that feeling you have when you get to the end of the year and feel like, where the hell did that go?” “And how are you going to do that?” I asked. “By remembering more. By providing my life with more chronological landmarks. By making myself more aware of time’s passage.” — Moonwalking with Einstein, Jonathan Foer
This post is the second in a series of intentional digital systems for families. My last post discussed documenting family moments using the 3 x 3 x 3 rule. Today I’m going to talk about creating and revisiting memories through a robust digital memory.
Why is this important? We all know that our time with our children flies by. “They grow up too fast” is a cliche because it is deeply true. As a parent, we can ‘expand subjective time’ by remembering more and enabling ourselves to revisit this time later vividly.
The goal of taking photographs and videos is to build a digital memory, essentially outsourcing a part of our brain so that we can more easily, accurately and tangibly pull up that memory later. A digital memory is useful if we can easily retrieve memories and they are enjoyable to browse. Given that our memories of our family are likely the most important in life, we must make our family digital memory a good one.
How memory works
There is a lot that we don’t know about how memory works, and I’m certainly not going to try and share the full science of memories here with you in one post. But we know a few things that can help guide us to making better digital and brain memories.
Unique memories
The first thing to know is that unique memories are easier to remember than memories with rivals. For example, it’s hard to remember what you had for lunch three Tuesdays ago. It has to compete with all rival lunch memories to stand out. On the other hand, you probably remember your first child’s birth. That is a unique memory without rivals.
We can derive two things from this. First, if we want to remember many things about our children’s childhood, it helps to do many unique things. The more you can do different things, rather than the same things on repeat, the more your brain will naturally remember.
Second, using a digital memory when doing routine activities is more important than for unique events. This might be counterintuitive! We normally want to take photos when we are doing something new (and you should!), but you’re more likely to forget the cute moment when your kid stops to smell flowers on the walk home from school or the giggles while playing a game in bed than the unique event. These are prime moments to take a quick photo or note to help remember later – your brain will find it hard to remember these beautiful details buried in the mundane parts of life on its own.
A fun side-effect of intentionally creating unique memories is that we also create a richer life; a year of unique memories will feel and be more full than a year of doing the same things.
Photos change our memories
The second thing to know about memory is that photos can change our memories. When we take photographs, our brain changes what it remembers of the moment—focusing more on the visual elements—and seems to forget some of the more tangible feelings, like the temperature, the smells, or the feeling of a little hand in ours. To counteract this, we can do two things. We can take our pictures and then put the phone away (use the 3x3x3 rule to help) to have time to experience without a camera. We can also write things down; simply jotting down a few notes about the experience and noting what’s happening with our non-visual senses will enable us to remember the moment in the future more vividly.
Revisiting memories changes them too
Revisiting memories also changes them. Revisiting memories makes them stronger and easier to retrieve in the future – somehow, they seem to get deeper in the brain and may even move from one part of the brain to another. It’s been proven that spaced learning, the process of revisiting information over time (the next day, ten days later etc.) enables us to retain information much faster than if we do not revisit it.
But there’s a twist! Revisiting memories can also make them less accurate. When we revisit a memory repeatedly, it can change a bit in our mind, such that it no longer resembles the truth at all. From this, we can derive that if we want to remember more, we should revisit our memories more frequently. If we value accurate memories, we should leverage a record of the event to help as it can stay consistent over time.
Principles for building a digital memory
From what we know about memories above, we can create some principles to help us build a good digital memory. While I wish I had done this all my life, it’s in becoming a parent that memory has become so important to me. My son is only two years old for 365 delicious days, and I want to remember every single one.
Principle one – Take photos of mundane moments
Principle one is to take photos of mundane moments. As we learned above, our brains will not find it easy to access these in the future.
Principle Two – Intentionally capture non-visual information
Put your phone away to capture other sensory information. If we are predominately looking through a camera, our visual memory will overpower other senses, and memories will feel two-dimensional. The best way to intentionally capture this information is to be present and then write it down notes within the same day.
Principle Three – Declutter your digital memory
It’s essential that your digital memory is easy to revisit. If you’ve ever been through a pile of bad photographs or scrolled through 30 photos of the same thing on your phone, you will know it’s boring to scroll through. It’s much more effective to curate your digital memory like a beautiful scrapbook. Delete most of the photos you take, and keep only the special ones. While it might feel painful to delete photos of your children, removing the junk will make your digital memory more powerful and easy to revisit later.
Principle Four – Revisit your digital memory often
Revisiting our digital memories will keep them vivid over time. The more we revisit our memories of our children, the more vivid they will stay in our brains over time. Practice exploring your digital memory often! Instead of scrolling or checking email while waiting in line or drinking coffee, visit your digital memory.
Tools
I’ve used ‘digital memory’ broadly until now because different tools are available to build a digital memory. What’s most important is not which tool you use but that you intentionally and consistently curate it for memory retention. I recommend:
Easiest tool: photo reel
The most basic and easy digital memory is your photo reel on your phone. The photo reel has the upside of taking very little additional work to curate. If you’re using photo reel as your digital memory, it’s crucial to regularly declutter photos (both when you have too many of a specific moment and when you have random stuff, like the picture of your receipt). The more trash in our photo reel, the less likely we will enjoy browsing it.
Jonny Harris has an excellent video about using your photo reel to remember every day, which I highly recommend watching if the photo reel is your tool of choice.
Advanced tool: digital journal
I like to add notes to photos to capture details outside the visual frame. I also want a tool that has a built-in mechanism to revisit memories. Several excellent journal apps do this; I recommend Day One, which is easy to use and has multiple good views for browsing entries. It has many great features like text-to-journal, an iPhone widget that reminds me to write every day, the ability to print books and more. Lastly, it has a built-in mechanism to revisit memories as it shows you entries from the year before on the same day—so every August 5th I can read and see what I have been doing on August 5th in years gone by.
Of course, you can go old school and create photo albums and write a diary if that works for you – for most of us, that’s impractical and a hard habit to sustain over time. They also aren’t backed up anywhere.
Wrap up
Building a digital memory is a powerful tool to build a more accurate and vivid memory of our lives with our children. The photographs, videos and notes we take enable us to remember the picture and unlock all the details stored in our brains.
I’ll leave you with this excerpt about Dutch psychologist Willem Wagenaar to inspire your digital memory:
“For six years, between 1978 and 1984, he kept a diary of the one or two most notable events that happened to him each day. For each event, he wrote down what occurred, who was involved, where it occurred, and when—each on a separate card. In 1984, he began testing himself to see just how much of those six years he’d be able to recall. He would pull out a random card and see if he had any memories of the events described that day. He found that he could recall almost everything that happened—especially the more recent events—with just a few retrieval clues. But nearly 20 percent of the oldest memories seemed to have totally disappeared. These events, described in his own diary, felt totally foreign, as if they had happened to a stranger.
But were those memories really gone? Wagenaar wasn’t convinced they were. He decided to take another look at ten events that he believed he’d completely forgotten, in which his diary suggested that another person had been present. He went back to those people and asked them for details that might help him recall his lost memories. In every single case, with enough prodding, someone was able to supply a detail that led Wagenaar to retrieve other parts of the memory. Not one of his memories had actually disappeared. He concluded that “in light of this one cannot say that any event was completely forgotten.” — Moonwalking with Einstein, Jonathan Foer
All of your memories of your life will be in your brain, so long as you have a tool to find them.