Human Buffering and Retrieval
Shane Ayers - SPHR, SCP, MS
Systems, Processes, Automation, Categorization and Exploration.
Subtitle: Where was I again? Oh, right.
tldr: memory management matters + 2 related practical strategies
Yesterday morning something happened to me that everyone has had happen to them. I walked into the kitchen and forgot why I was there. I did the usual thing. I ran down the list of possible reasons I could be in the kitchen.
Many others may be familiar with this as the occurrence of an adult naming all of your siblings, cousins, and even aunts and uncles before they arrive accurately at your name (if they arrive at it at all). "Uh Timmy, I mean Jaime - no, umm Harry! Nope, that's not it. Listen, you know what your name is. Come over here and help me with these bags!" (You may be familiar with the follow-up to this moment of "Shane! That's right, you're Shane."
This is one of those things about existence, those minor indignities that become the background noise of everyday experience. It's something that happens so often that we stop thinking about it altogether. I think that's unfortunate because the regularity with which it occurs is actually a very good reason for us to understand it better and find methods to work within this space.
Mental Buffers
It's been well known for decades in cognitive sciences that humans have a limited capacity for working memory. That is to say that we have a very small number of slots of things that we can remember the entirety of in one shot. On average, that is between 5 to 9 things, with the vast majority falling at 7 (like the days of the week or the deadly sins). When was the last time you saw a boy band with more than 7 members?
I know what you're thinking. "But what about the people that can recite Pi to a thousand digits?" You're not wrong but you're thinking of something different. Memorization and retrieval are not the same thing as working memory. Here's an exercise to illustrate the difference. In this article I'm going to name 10 objects. Without looking back at the first one, see if you can remember all 10. The first object is chalk. You will know that you're cheating at this task if you scroll back up, since the objects will be far enough apart that you won't be able to see all of them.
If you look at human systems from religion to organizational structures and methods of processing materials, you'll notice that the total variation tends to be rather small. Most people remember about 5-7 main deities in the Greco-Roman pantheon, for example. If they remember more, it is because of ease of retrieval ("Oh, that's right. Athena was born full grown from Zeus' head" and "Ah, yes, Artemis and Apollo, the twins"). In fact, you'll find that ancient systems of information transfer, including epic poems, mythology and oral traditions, had many tricks to aid in retrieval because they understood the buffer problem. The second object is a mirror.
When we get a feeling (i.e. "I need the car keys"), we initiate an action. When we arrive at a destination to perform an action but forgot what action to perform, one of two things has occurred.
The buffer is also distinct from either long or short term memory. Working memory are ideas that you are handling right now. Think of them as balls you're juggling. Short term memory is a nearby basket of recently handled balls that you've decided to store for a bit. Long term memory is a shed in your backyard that you have to walk to and look through shelving to find a particular ball to juggle. Objects three and four are a ladder and a slide respectively.
Retrieval tasks
In the prior examples, the case of the disappearing reason for being in the kitchen and the relative who goes through the entire family tree before remembering your name, there is a type of retrieval algorithm at play. The person looking for a piece of information that is not already at hand or in recent memory must search through their long term memory for information and, in most cases, the search takes on a logical order. The fifth object is parsley. For example, have you ever been upset and attempted to use someone's name for emphasis but someone else's name came up first because of how frequently you associate that person with the state of being upset? The order is based on associations and quasi-logical relationships. Did I come into the kitchen for coffee? No, I drank that already. Okay, next most likely thing. Next branch in the tree.
Retrieval and the buffer have an obvious and necessary relationship. You don't need to retrieve something that's already in the buffer and you don't need to buffer easily retrieved things. For example, if you only have 1 name that people refer to you by, there's no need to buffer that. It's always in reaching distance without effort from the fact that you are constantly reassociating your entire self with it. Additionally, the buffer stores objects once retrieved if they are not in constant reaching distance. The sixth object is a microphone. Have you given up on remembering them already? What was the second object?
Buffer Refresh Dynamics
This subject is one that has been interesting to me for some time for reasons other than wanting to remember everything all the time. At the beginning of 2022, I spent a lot of time reading and rereading Think & Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It was recommended by a motivational speaker/ self-development guru that I wanted to learn more from. He gave specific instructions to read the book the way that the book recommended you read it, which was interesting because I usually don't take orders from printed material (no shade to my friends in food service or manufacturing that do).
What I noticed, only after contemplation in the course of conversation on the subject, was that while i was reading the book, every idea from it was easily accessible without me having to think about it. By reading it, I mean that at some point each day I was being exposed to that content. When I stopped reading it, the information became more and more distant. Given the number of times I read the book consecutively, some of it has embedded on a more long term basis but I could not recall many specific details of it right now even if I wanted to. The seventh object is a sticker. This is less like cramming for a test and forgetting right after and more like remembering someone's nickname but forgetting why you gave it to them.
The lesson here, for me, was that freshness matters. Yes, we're all aware of recency bias but rarely do we leverage it with intention. We do commit things to memory, and sometimes that involves repetition and memorization tactics, but rarely do we, as a norm, set out to refresh specific things in memory as a daily task. However, there's actually a practice for that that is fairly well-spread but considered to be spiritual and/or woo woo. The eighth object is a phone. They're called Mantras.
领英推荐
Speaking into memory
I had a coworker who used to repeat a phrase that her spiritual leader taught her. I'll paraphrase. "I'll say what I see so I can hear what I said." This seems relevant to the topic at hand for a few reasons. First, it implies recognition of the constraints here by others over long periods of time. Spiritual organizations, religions and others, pass bodies of knowledge down relevant to navigating life as a human, including working with the ways our brains work and don't work. Second, it points at a hack that we can recognize from other spaces. The ninth object is a pair of chopsticks.
In the earlier example of going to the kitchen to look for car keys, we concluded that either I didn't store the objective very well in the first place or it was bumped off the list of 7 by something else. In contemplating it during my commute, I realized that something I could have done is to say aloud what the objective was. Why would this be effective? Committing to put things into words, to name something, has some sort of impact on cognition. I cover this in a previous article, "(Some of) The Power in Naming". By going through the process of putting my urge or thought into words, I was building up my relationship to that idea, bringing it closer and within easier reach. The last object is a cactus. The other immediate impact is that I heard myself say it, so the data that was sitting in one part of my brain (let's consider this the urge center of the brain) has now passed through the language and speech production centers, and then come back in through the audio processing and speech interpretation centers of the brain. It's like putting an additional memory stake in the ground. Now, when I attempt to recall why I'm here, I will remember that I just took the effort to say why and I may even remember what I actually said.
In other words, we can consider Mantras as serving a plurality of purposes for the formation and retrieval of information. First, they force you to put something into words. Second, you hear yourself saying it. Third, the very act of remembering on a frequent basis makes the memory more accessible. It builds a cognitive routine that makes things easier (through the magic of myelination).
Quiz time!
What were the 6 things in the middle of the list of 10 I just gave you? Not the first 2 and not the last 2? Okay, so I cheated a bit because not only did I not give you all 10 together but I handed you a bunch of other objects to hold onto while asking you to remember those 10. The second half of this point will come in the next section.
Practical implications for work and life
Subtitle: Who cares?
So, we now know that we have a limited capacity for keeping ideas immediately at hand and that we have some power to influence that. Why does this matter? Why post this to LinkedIn?
One of my long-standing contentions is that there is a facet of humans that is relatively unique. We view anything, living or not, as a fellow sentient being if it is sufficiently complex and its responses to stimuli are nondeterministic. Here's what I mean. We all have that one piece of hardware or software that is finnicky or moody. Sometimes it wants to act right and sometimes it doesn't. That's personification. We have deemed this thing to be complex enough that it qualifies as person-level. This is the reason many people name their cars the same way they name their pets.
Personification helps us to deal with complex systems in a way that works for our brains the same way that stories help us to remember and handle complex arrangements of information.
In the course of reading this article about memory management, did you think about work? I did. I thought about the moment at the beginning of a meeting about a project where the leader asks "So where are we at with X?" Doesn't that remind you, just a bit, of "What did I come into the kitchen for?" That's because they are related problems. Organizations function very similarly to the way people do but at a scale above the level of the individual. If a person can remember 7 things at a time, how many things can an organization keep top of mind at once? For reference, what are the core departments in any organization? And why are there less than 7 of them? (Just off the top of my head, sales, marketing, IT, HR, leadership, customer service and maybe security. These are often consolidated roles.)
What this tells us about organizations is that they require similar refresh dynamics to people and that the people working in those organizations also require refresh dynamics for important things to keep top of mind.
Long term memory illustrated
As promised, here's the last of 10 objects that I challenged you to remember to make a point about working memory.
To contrast this, and really bring the point home, in Greco-Roman mythology, who is the deity of love? And the deity of war? In norse mythology, who is the deity of Thunder? Did you get at least 2 out of 3? Were those answers quick or did they take a while to get? Why can you remember something that you briefly learned in grade school with more clarity and quicker recall than something you just read?
Practical methods
As promised, here are practical methods.