The Persistence of Memory: What the pandemic can teach us about how we learn

When you visit a place that you haven’t been to for a year or more, two things usually happen. The first is you say to yourself, “is it really a year since I was last here? It feels like it’s just been a week.” And the other thing you might say is “that’s new,” when you see a building that wasn’t, in fact, there, last time you visited. These two concepts are polar opposites, yet they are united under the dome of memory, and they certainly helped me get through the isolation of pandemic lockdown.

Memory is a strange and wonderful thing. Our distracted brains can completely lose track of where we put the TV remote, yet many of us can recall the phone number from our childhood home. After ten years of needing reading glasses, I still regularly leave a room, forgetting to bring them with me, and simultaneously forgetting where I left them. But if I drive back to the neighborhood where I grew up, I will be brimming with recollections of where this street goes, and of what life was like here, and what that house or building or store looked like so long ago. For certain types of memory, there is a persistence that makes it easy to pick up certain things right from where you left off.

So yes, I made it my emotional life raft for the entire dark years of 2020 and 2021. I told myself, "yes, the wait is long, and it is being made even more difficult by the fact that there is no fixed date for when it will all be over." But despite the isolation and deprivation that the lockdown delivered, I held on to the promise that when I would once again return to those places where I once worked, played and shopped, my persistent memory would pick up right from where it left off. It will ask, “Was it really a year since I was last here?”

We have tried, collectively, to glean whatever positives we can from the isolation of lockdown and from the uncertainties of the new normal ahead. We have discovered that for some, the prospect of working from home, balancing life, and working along new, more personal timelines might be possible. Others are eagerly anticipating a return to the familiarity of the office, along with rituals such as the daily commute, which in its 18-month absence revealed its value to some as a decompression tool.

We have read a great deal about how working from home taught us much about how we collaborate, how employees work and how managers manage. But what about how we remember? What benefits can we extract from this experiment about this vital action?

This time-hopping ability of memory – to pick up where it left off a year ago –?represents a remarkable set of skills that our perpetually adaptable human brain is capable of, once it's given the chance, and hopefully employees and managers will be able to give pause to contemplate this as they rebuild the work environment in the new normal. For example, what about that new condo over there?

The Building That Wasn't There Before

Imagine you are driving or cycling downtown – to a part of the city that you haven’t been to since before the pandemic. As you're moving along the street, you see a building – an office tower or a condo complex – that has just recently been built. “That’s new,” you say, “that wasn’t there before.” Our memory is really good at immediately picking out things that were not there the last time you took a mental snapshot of this place.

But what about an old thing that is no longer there? Can you remember that too?

Imagine that instead of a new building imposing itself on your mental memory, you see a construction site. The fencing has gone up around a space or a city block. Another new condo is going up there too, but construction hasn’t started yet. Now…what was there before? Can you remember what has been knocked down in order to make the space for this new building?

Unless it was a distinctive building – one that already held particular significance to you, it might take you a while to remember what had been there, even if you had passed by it every day for years. This happens to me all the time, and it bothers me enough that I must turn to Google Street View to look at an earlier image of the street in order to re-observe the building that I cannot mentally recall.?

So, it seems, the imposition of a changed object onto an existing memory is easier to process than is the recollection of a deleted object from that same space. This is because in the first instance, information is being pushed to you. In the second, you are being forced to pull information out of you, and that’s a lot more difficult.

What Do I Recognize? What Can I Recall?

If you learned a second language some time in your life but haven’t used it for a while, this same phenomenon will present itself. If someone asks you, “do you speak Spanish, you might say, “I can understand it when I hear it, but I can't speak it anymore.” That, again, is because information pushed on to your memory in the form of spoken words, is easier to process than information that you must pull out of it. If you hear words, you can recognize them, but if you must speak them, you must first root around the depths of your memory in order to recall them. They are there, but they are buried under years of other memories.

My evening job is as a musician. At least it was before...well, you know. Rehearsal is a marvelous demonstration of the difference between memory at work and memory that just thinks it's at work. Learning a song takes several steps: first you must become familiar with it. Then you must learn its parts: the chords, the melody, the verse and chorus structure, and the words. Then comes practice, where you play along to a recorded version of the tune. Then comes rehearsal. That's when you realize just how much you haven't learned yet. When there's no backing track to guide you, you're really on your own. Better to find that out in rehearsal than on stage.

Practicing a tune against a recorded version makes you think you are memorizing effectively. And to some extent you are, but not far enough. Not yet. Your brain is working off micro-cues that are being pushed upon its memory by hearing the music just milliseconds in advance.

Consider also that annoying person who is watching a movie with you and who has seen it before. “Oh this part coming up is so scary!” they say, or “watch what this guy does!” These comments come from someone who is receiving micro-cues from the movie, are triggering location memories from the last time they saw it. But if you asked that same person to give you a scene-by-scene rundown of the movie over coffee somewhere, their recall would not be as accurate.

Memorization is very different from using recognition cues. True memorization is an arduous process. Facts and sequences must be carved into the surface of long term memory and will require many repetitions before recollection does indeed become effortless. This strikes me when I consider how people have been trained in the workplace to learn new skills. Time and budget demand that courses be compressed into a day that becomes simultaneously too short and too long. It's not enough time overall to absorb a skill, but the amount of information delivered moves into overload by the halfway point.

New Opportunities for Learning

There are certain skills that cannot survive a return to this type of learning. Cyberhygiene is one. It has become increasingly obvious over the past couple of years - and would still have even if Covid hadn't come along - that the weak link in every company's cybersecurity strategy is people. We inadvertently click on phishing links, we overlook basic protocols like VPNs and multifactor authentication, and we fall for social engineering tricks. Of course we do. We're human, and we react more than we proact.

Memory, as it applies to learning, requires time to be absorbed. And this absorption cannot be done in a single sitting. The actions that can lead to companies and hospitals being brought to a halt through ransomware, or having their data stolen and sold through breaches, come from actions that resemble micro-cues of their own: we are led toward them through familiarity and the ease of not having to think critically about what we are about to do in clicking that link.

The act of questioning a request in an email and applying judgement as to what to do next should be as natural as saying "that building wasn't there before - what's changed?" It should place employees in a situation where they have to dig into their memories to determine what to do next, rather than click out of the pressure of an overloaded schedule, or a watchful manager.

The Future of Memory

There will be much discussion in the coming months about the merits of working from home versus returning to the office or of hybridizing the two. Much of this centers around how each will encourage or suppress collaboration, productivity and trust between management and staff.

But some thought should be given over to the future of human memory. In both places, the office, and the home office, we have witnessed unreasonable time pressures, interruptions, and an increased pace of expectation that has led to employees in all industries feeling overburdened, even to the point of mass resignation.

The work-from-home model that we have all just experienced was really version 1.0, fraught with missteps that happen when people are thrown into a new situation without adequate preparation. But the new normal, as people are calling it, is not just about location, and it certainly cannot be a lift-and-shift of old methods of working to new or old spaces. Instead it presents an opportunity to look at the way people work and think, and how this work now has numerous opportunities to fit more closely to the mental and physiological workings of each individual employee.

This also means we have an opportunity to substantially rework the training model, using technologies like augmented or virtual reality to deliver experiential learning at a frequency and timeline that best fits the individual, and which, most importantly, shifts knowledge to a place where it can be recalled effortlessly and in time to do some good.

This is the transcript of the CoolTimeLife podcast entitled The Persistence of Memory. If you would like to listen to it or review other podcasts in this series, visit my podcast page at stevenprentice.com/podcast.html