Have you ever been on a long drive and suddenly realized that you barely remember the past several minutes of driving?
Although the thought of driving without paying conscious attention to the road may be unsettling, we actually carry out complex behaviors without much thought all the time—and it's all thanks to our memory.
In its simplest form, memory does one basic job: it forms associations between things that occur together. Just as we learn to associate a name with a face, or a scent with a food, memory allows certain contexts to become associated with specific thoughts and actions.
For instance, when we learn to drive, we're taught to move our foot to the brake pedal whenever we see brake lights ahead. As we gain experience behind the wheel and these two events repeatedly occur together, we quickly reach a point where we automatically get set to press the brake pedal the moment we see brake lights—without needing to think about doing so.
Or perhaps you've noticed how fluently you can navigate through the apps and menus on your smartphone—as if your thumbs have little minds of their own—and that if someone reorganizes the apps on your home screen, this fluency can be difficult to relearn.
Each time we do something, our memory system makes connections between the behavior and the current context. With experience, behaviors that once required conscious control can be activated automatically when we encounter a familiar context.
These automatic behaviors show how memory can control our behavior without the need to consciously remember past events. Some researchers even call this form of memory "automatic control."
Because automatic memory is by nature unconscious, we often don't notice how essential it is for most of our everyday behavior. Automatic memory allows us to function efficiently.
If we couldn't rely on automatic control to trigger key actions while driving, we would be far less likely to survive those episodes of highway mind-wandering. If every thought and action required a conscious choice, something as simple as walking and talking would become an enormously demanding task.
Automatic decision-making
Driving scenarios are relatable, which makes them useful for illustrating how automatic memory works. They also show how important this form of memory is for us to function effectively.
However, once you begin looking for automatic memory elsewhere, it becomes difficult to identify behaviors that don't rely on these unconscious processes. Even our attempts to consciously control our attention may depend on automatic processes.
For example, why is it that certain things come to mind when we walk into a meeting with our boss—while very different things come to mind when you get together with an old friend? It's not as if we always make conscious decisions about what to remember in these cases.
The explanation is that these two different scenarios are each associated with different sets of past experiences. When we encounter a particular person, experiences associated specifically with them spring to mind automatically as a result of the memory associations we've formed over time.
Although automatic memory is essential to our daily functioning, it does come at a cost. For instance, we all find ourselves acting the same way over and over in familiar situations—even when those actions run contrary to the way we'd prefer to act. But the truth is, if we want to change our patterns of behavior, we need repeated opportunities to form new associations so that our automatic behaviors begin to align with our goals.
One strategy for overcoming automatic memory is to practice the behaviors you want to change in new contexts. For example, if you find that having difficult conversations with your partner always ends with you reacting negatively without meaning to, perhaps you need to try having those discussions in front of a friend or therapist.
Changing the context like this can help reduce the chance that your typical responses will be activated, making it easier to practice changing your behaviors in critical moments. For behaviors that have been built over a lifetime, there's no quick hack. Relearning takes time and effort.
That is why, as an expert in memory and attention, I have compassion for people who struggle to change old habits. It's also why I'm downright terrified when the city adds a new stop sign to an intersection where drivers are used to having the right of way.
The Life of Earth
https://chuckincardinal.blogspot.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment
Stick to the subject, NO religion, or Party politics