Making memories: Childhood ‘recordings’ easier with cues, repetition

With three growing boys at home, I buy a lot of milk. And every time I stand before the dairy cooler, try as I might not to do it, I can’t help but sing to myself:

“P-R-O, D-U-C, E-R-S spells Producers...”

Some of you reading this will have to finish it, so go ahead, I’ll wait.

(“When you know quality, you’ll say yes to producers.”)

Growing up in the ’70s, I spent too many of the hot days of summer break planted in the air-conditioned living room watching TV and I heard the milk jingle hundreds of times, embedding it firmly in my memory, along with Bugs Bunny cartoons, the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song, and other flotsam and jetsam of childhood.

Last week, a photo in The Fresno Bee brought forth another buried relic. Looking at the photo of children performing at the annual Peach Blossom Festival, I suddenly recalled not only the poem I recited there as a fifth-grader, but the poem learned by my best friend, which I had heard her practice over and over. I asked my childhood friends if they remembered their poems and, yes, many of them not only recalled the poems, but also remembered the experiences of hearing them performed.

Good grief, I thought. How is it these memories that have little importance to my adult life are so easily brought up when, now, I struggle to fill out forms requiring me to list my children’s dates of birth? (Sorry, guys.)

What is is about our memory during childhood that makes it all so easy, and why does that weaken over time?

David Noelle, an associate professor of cognitive and information sciences at UC Merced and expert on how our brains store and recall memories, says there are several factors at play. The moments of our lives are not stored so much as mini-movies, which would enable us to pull them out as complete records, but as fragments. They are broken into puzzle pieces. We may connect cues to the moments that, as time goes on, remind us of the puzzle piece. Our ability to recall the moment can depend on all sorts of things: how many cues we have for the memory; how many of the puzzle pieces we stored; how often we “rehearse” the moment in our minds; and, how many other similar puzzle pieces might be stored in our brains, too.

That last one is important. Those puzzle pieces can get mixed up or, as we get older, become damaged. As we grow, more puzzle pieces are made and they can interfere with one another, much like two radio stations whose frequencies are too close together.

“It can become difficult to retrieve a memory because we have other memories that are similar enough that we can’t make a coherent picture of those two, so we can’t recall what happened,” Noelle explained.

When we are children, a common theory goes, we have fewer interfering memories, he said. The rehearsal of something, such as the repeated recitations of my poem or the Producers commercial, also help lock the memory in place.

For parents, if we want our children to remember special moments, and not just jingles, it helps to give them a variety of physical things to serve as cues – such as a photo, a souvenir, or an entry in a diary. If we’re trying to help them memorize facts from a school lesson, it helps to have them recall the memory in different situations, not just at the homework table, but while walking outside or riding in the car. There’s something about sleep, too, that helps people store memories from the day, Noelle said.

Readers of last week’s column will recall there is research that suggests relying on one’s smartphone camera to record moments may actually weaken our memories. Noelle said the trick may be to use the photo as a cue, but not to rely too heavily on cameras. “Personally, I don’t take a lot of pictures when I’m on holiday because I want to be more engaged in the actual experience,” he said.

Keeping a diary may be one of the best methods of all – even for important events, weddings or tragedies, that we tell ourselves we’re certain to never forget. Research increasingly indicates that eyewitness testimony based solely on memory can be faulty. “We have this confidence in remembering very important things in our life and it’s unnerving to recognize that, at least in the details, it might not be right,” Noelle said.

If we want to remember moments that are important, we must record them in some way and refer back to them to keep the recollection links functioning. Without physical clues, it’s rather impossible for us to know anything with certainty.

One of Noelle’s earliest memories is of being a toddler, home alone with his dad while his mother was in a hospital following the birth of his brother. The sight of his father in the kitchen was unusual, he said, as was the sense of the house being empty. “It’s a very visual memory,” he said.

But, asked if it was true, he paused and replied: “I have no idea.”

This story was originally published March 15, 2016 at 3:10 PM with the headline "Making memories: Childhood ‘recordings’ easier with cues, repetition."