January 23, 2014 • 36 mins
Ever wish you could take a troubling event from your past and dial down the memory without subjecting yourself to total recall erasure? Explore the science of memory/story editing in this Stuff to Blow Your Mind episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Ducklas, and
this week we're talking about memory editing. And if this
were your average science journalism story, you would inevitably start
(00:27):
with a reference to Eternal Sunshine of the Spot Spot
was Mine. You know, have you have you noticed this trend?
Like any story that relates at all to changing memories
or racing memories, they will name drop that film in
the lead. Well, because it was such an intriguing idea
that you could, uh you could alter or completely remove
(00:47):
a memory that had been dogging you your entire life. Yeah,
it's true. But I you know, I feel like there
have been enough stories about like changing memories and and
and and what memories actually are, that we don't need
that film as the reference point anymore for an actual
story about the science of memory and the science of
altering memory. I always feel like a little bit insulted.
(01:10):
You know. It's like someone's like, hey, so if you've
seen let me tell you about space. You've seen Star Wars, right, Like,
you don't have to start with Star wars. We live
in a the world. We're surrounded by space, alright, Alright,
so I think, and maybe I'm projecting my own feelings
on here, is that the problem is that the spotless
mind idea is it's erroneous. And it takes this idea
(01:30):
that you could like return your mind to some pristine
platonic state, right where everything is completely new and fresh.
But that is not the case. Our minds are the
cages that we have. But it turns out that we
can actually tame them to a certain degree. We can't erase,
we can't make them spotless, but we can make them
(01:53):
a little bit more manageable. The problem is just just
this inherent misunderstanding of what memory is in the first place.
And I was looking at this survey that was published
in two thousand eleven by PLS so one found that
almost two thirds of Americans believe that memory works like
a video camera and that it's like we're recording events
so we can review them later. Yeah, it's not so
(02:16):
at all. And we've we've discussed the science of memory
um a good bit in previous episodes. Off to make
sure I throw some of those back up on the
website and on the social media pages around the time
this episode publishes. But indeed, we've talked before about the
seven Sins of memory. Uh. These of course were brought
to mind by Daniel Shackter, the former chair of Harvard
(02:38):
University Psychology Psychology Department and author of the book The
Seven Sins of Memories Cohen How the Mind forgets and remembers,
and he mentions, uh, these seven just seven ways that
all our memories are uh untrustworthy at the very least.
For instance, there's transience, So that's the weakening or loss
of memory over time. What you have for lunch eight
(03:00):
years ago today, the side of sweet potatoes there human
sprinkling on top. Okay, well that was a really good
sandwich apparently, so that was stuck with you. But for
the most part, these memories just fade over time. It's
just how it works. And then there's absent mindedness. Uh
so this involves attention in memory. We're just not paying
attention to what's going on around it, so we're not
(03:21):
getting all the data. There's blocking, that's the failed attempt
to recall tidbits of memory a face, a name, Etceterates
on the tip of my tongue. But I can't remember
what it is. Uh. There's misattribution. This is when we
recall an authentic memory, but then aspects of it are misattributed.
And this includes scenarios such as incorrect incorrect time or
place identity, misattribution, or confusion over the originator of an idea.
(03:45):
We've all had those conversations where you're telling a story
about something that you think happened to you and it
turns out it's happening to the person you you're you're
speaking to, or you have some very pivotal detail of
the story completely backwards, like oh, that trip that wasn't
a trip I took with this person, was a trip
I took with this person. It wasn't this past girlfriend,
it was this past girlfriend, or you know, whatever the
scenario might be. And then there's suggestibility. Our minds are
(04:10):
and our memories entirely susceptible yes to to suggestions. So
you were to say it enough times, I might either
actually get a astronomy sandwich for lunch or falsely remember
that I had one. There's bias, uh, and that you
see this all the time in people's memories of crimes.
(04:30):
If they have a particular bias in mind regarding uh uh, say,
the racial profiling of suspects, then that's going to have
an influence on how they remember the crime that occurred.
And then there's persistence, and that's the unwanted recall of
information that's disturbing and that actually ties in a lot
with what we're gonna talk about in this episode. So
there are all these ways that our memory is pretty
(04:53):
much jack from the get go. And to your your point,
so many people think it's just all a bunch of
video information and stored in her head, which which couldn't
be further from the truth. Yeah, there's that great cognitive
psychology experiment that was done by Daniel Simon's and Christopher
Chebery's that showed how selective attention works. You probably heard
(05:14):
about this. There's a video of people with white shirt
song and a video of people with black shirt song
and they were playing I think basketball or something like. Yeah,
I watched it, but I really wasn't paying that much attention. Okay,
well then you if you were, if you were doing
it as as they instructed, you were probably looking at
the white shirted team, right. You were told to really
(05:34):
figure out how many passes were made between the members
of this white shirted team and you probably, as participants did,
did not notice the gorilla walking through the clutch of
white shirted and black short players. So this is a
good example of attention and selective attention and memory. Yeah,
there are a number of these type of pranks that
(05:57):
you see carried out and that you can find them
on YouTube once where they'll take say an individual will
be sort of in the background for a person and
then they'll like switch out the person playing that part
to see if they notice. And it's it's phenomenal how
how often people do not notice. Um. There's a British
television series called The Black Mirror, which we've mentioned before,
and there's an episode titled The Entire History of You,
(06:19):
and in this near future sci fi vision of reality,
most people have this little electronic device called a grain
implanted uh in their brain and it basically collects constant
video of their life and then you can go back
and replay the video, which of course ends up having
(06:41):
disastrous um consequences for the characters in this particular episode.
But it's it's very interesting that model because they they
in this episode they create a sci fi technological version
of memory that is in keeping with the with the
way most people think memory is right, and in fact
it's not. As you said, there are seven sins of memory.
(07:02):
And really, if you think about it, we are the
magicians of memory because we have misdirection and misp misperception,
and then we try to piece together this pattern that
makes sense to us, and boom, you have this manufactured
reality that comes out on a plate for you. Um.
And the thing is is that we continue to take
this memory out and look at it all the time.
(07:25):
In fact, every time you take out a memory, you
change it a bit. Yes, yeah, I've we mentioned before
that don't think of your memory as a little stone
sculpture that you keep in a drawer. It's a sculpture
made out of clay. Every time you take it out,
you're jabbing it, you're changing it. You're bringing new information,
new interpretation into that memory. And then you put it back.
(07:46):
And so so every time you draw it out, you're
you're changing, you're getting it a little bit further removed
from the actual reality. And here's the thing. These memories
are the foundation of the story of who you are, right,
and so this is where emotional health and something called
story editing comes in because there's this idea that you
can change your memory and maybe even alter your future.
(08:10):
And we'll get more into that, but before we do,
I want to discuss a little bit about why we
take these memories out in the first place and sort
of obsess over them. And in order to do that,
you gotta go to Papa Freud. Yeah, and it's great because,
in classic Freud's style, he goes right to your childhood, right,
oh yeah, yeah. In fact, um, in beyond the pleasure principle,
Freud actually documents his grandson's particular habit of taking his
(08:35):
toys and hiding them or throwing them away. And when
he does that, um, his grandson says forth, meaning gone.
And then he watches his grandson um taking them back
and saying, dah, they're here. So, in this one particular
instance and beyond the pleasure principle, his grandson has like
I think, it's just like a real with a string
(08:55):
tied to it, and he's in his crib and over
and over again he does the dog game. He throws
that spool away and then he reels it back in.
And so what Freud says is that the kid is
actually um marking a cultural achievement here because the kid
is equating this and just stay with me on this,
(09:16):
uh that this fort doab has gone and back with
his mom and his mom leaving him but coming back
and saying that he's getting far more pleasure from the
daw part the coming back part, and so he's mastering
control over his emotions at his mother sometimes disappearing or
(09:36):
having to leave the room. And this idea that that
you know, your your main caregiver might not come back
or come back, that's that's pretty fascinating uh interpretation, and
especially since the father of a nearly two year old
who's really into that the whole casting of objects and
then also playing hide and go seek with like a
(09:58):
stuffed cat and that we have in the house. It
really loves to be who go, Where's where's fat cat?
Where's fat cat go? Oh? Well, fat cats under the
slide and then it's you know, tremendously um entertaining to
him defined the cat that was barely hidden. Yeah, So
this is a huge lesson for humans that life is ephemeral.
Things come, things go, people come, and people go, And
(10:19):
this really ties into the idea of repetition compulsion and mastery,
and maybe, just maybe that's why we continue to take out,
in particular traumatic memories bother some memories, and we look
at them and examine them over and over again, each
time hoping to get a better understanding. But the problem
(10:41):
is that, especially according to Freud, those memories are unconscious.
They are buried and they are hidden, and so you
just kind of get these little crumbs of your unconscious.
But then you have someone by the name of Timothy D. Wilson,
this is a University of Virginia psychologists, who says this
unconscious or unconscious as he calls it, is off limits
(11:03):
to us. So it's really only through conscious thoughts that
we can change the mechanisms of the unconscious world for us. Mm.
So he has this idea of, for instance, if you
establish regular acts of kindness, that you could tease out
progressive changes in behavior as determined by your unconscious. So
(11:26):
now we're talking about changing your behavior through your story
of yourself. Yes, yes, yeah, And this is what this
is where everything really gets interesting here, because essentially we
are getting into that eternal sunshine of the spotless mind territory.
But instead of changing your memories through the use of
lasers or or a little bit of a little tiny
(11:48):
electronic device that goes in your brain as in Black Mirror.
It's about thinking about it is that I'm using your
actual mental architecture as it exists, your actual mental machinery, uh,
that you have in your head, and using it to
alter memory, using the weakness of memory as a strength.
Really yeah, and it's really effective, as we will discuss UM.
(12:08):
Wilson in his two thousand eleven book Redirect, The Surprising
New Science of Psychological Change, looks at why programs like
Scared Straight, you know, the taking the at risk youth
to prisons and trying to scare them straight, why those
sort of programs fail, and why story editing just having
those kids change their story, their narrative maybe a far
(12:30):
more effective strategy. Yeah. Yeah, I've been reading a little
bit about this, uh to it in regards to children,
like the dangers of labeling um, particularly reading an article
on biting and about how just the one thing they
always advises and dealing with biting, which which is a
pretty common occurrence with with children, especially as their acquiring
language and learning how to better express themselves, uh than
(12:53):
by simply you know, fighting into something is that. But
there's there's always this danger of referring to them as
a bitter, because then that comes their story and they
can interpret interpret that, even at a very young age,
and they say, oh, I'm a buyer, So I bite
in the same way that one might think, oh, well
I'm you know, I'm destined to wind up in a
in a prison, so I guess I will. This is
the this is what I am. I guess that's what
(13:14):
I'm going to be. Well, you know that's interesting because
this is that is exactly at This is this idea
that you you put this narrative in place and then
you follow it to the letter and you become it.
And Wilson first discovered this power of story editing in
the eighties when he found that struggling students had fallen
for the same old narrative, I'm bad at school, which
(13:34):
was driving this sort of self defeating cycle. And he
gave forties students, these students who were not doing well
in school a new narrative, which was everyone fails at first. Okay,
so that recast the whole idea, Wait, what I may
not be bad at school? Everyone fails at first. This
is a thing. So suddenly these students are being introduced
(13:55):
to this new idea. And he had the students read
accounts from other students had who had struggled with grades
and then improved. There's also videotape footage of other students
who relay their tales of eventual academic success. And the
results were pretty astounding. The students who received the information,
compared to those who did not A were significantly less
(14:16):
apt to leave college by the end of their sophomore year.
Be they had a significantly greater increase in grade point
average even one year after the study. And see they
performed significantly better on sample items from the g r
E or the Graduate Record Exam. And this is all
from a thirty minute session, one thirty minute session which
(14:38):
had staying power even one year after. And this just
shows you how important priming is really. And I was
thinking about this University Michigan study, and this study they
had students with the same abilities and perform its splinter
into two groups. The first was told that men performed
better than women on math tests. The second was told
that no matter what they might have heard, there was
(14:59):
no difference and abilities among the two genders than they
were given the math test, and in the first group,
men outscored women by twenty points. In the second group,
the one that was told no matter what they had heard,
that the abilities are the same, they were outscored only
by two points. I mean, that's a huge difference. And
that's just from that one priming example and indeed stressing
(15:23):
the point of thinking for yourself and questioning authority, not
questioning authority in the sense that I'm going to, you know,
break a law, just because if they were questioning the
established script that is handed down to us about who
you are, what you are, what you're capable of achieving.
And uh, and yeah, there's just something almost endlessly powerful
about being able to to sort of break free of
(15:44):
those chains. Yeah. I mean if you think about it,
like in in Um some of your most um, how
shows it the delicate situations in life where you were
really struggling with someone or something, if someone came and
gave you as script or just even this this idea,
(16:04):
this other narrative of hey, another perception, how could that
have changed your life? That's how powerful this is. Now
another area that this becomes important again you mentioned earlier
how arguably a lot of the stuff is going on
into some subconscious level. There's there's say a bad memory,
scarring memory, traumatic memory, even that is keeps popping up
(16:27):
again and again, this persistent memory, and it's it's kind
of like a Rubic's cube, but not a Rubics cube
that you ever sit down and say, all right, I'm
gonna sit down and solve this thing. But it's one
that's just always sitting on your desk or is in
the drawer that you're always opening, and it's there. It's
it's it's seemingly unsolvable and uh, and you may tinker
with it for a minute and then put it back.
You're right, So your mind is tinkering with it mostly
(16:51):
the unconscious level, but every once in a while it surfaces.
Can you become aware of this thing that's bothering you?
So it just this this persistent um a bit of
annoyance or or even just nagging depression. Anytime when we
we cover a topic like this, always think back to
Alan Robe grulay novel Jealousy, and it's a it's an
(17:11):
experimental novel. Um. I don't recommend picking up and reading
it unless you know what you're getting into. Just style
wise because it's a it's a little unorthodox. But the
entire novel is this this man who owns a banana plantation,
and he's looking through Venetian blinds observing his wife and
trying to figure out if she's having an affair with
(17:33):
the guy who runs the neighboring banana plantation. And and
so it's just him poring over what he knows and
how little he knows, over and over again, uh, and
occasionally observing a smeared centipede on the wall and trying
to decide what he should do. And the in spoiler,
the entire novel passes and he doesn't decide what he's
(17:53):
gonna do. He's just this just this endless nagging frustration
over how little he knows and now and and that's
kind of what happens in these cases. We have limited
amount of information. It's kind of like the cock Snowflake
that we talked about Snowflake episode. There's only so much
information you may know about a given situation, and unless
you actually were to go outside of that bubble of knowledge, um,
(18:16):
you're never going to solve it. So so again, these
these problems, these memories, these uh, they just exist there
in the in the peripheries, and and it's only through
actually tackling them that we can alter them into a
shape that fits in and kind of vanishes into the background. Okay,
we're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back,
(18:38):
we're going to talk about how you can actually get
outside of that bubble of knowledge, change your narrative, and
perhaps change your life. All Right, we're back, Julie. Have
you read The Secret, The Secret, The Secret, the one
with the little like the red wax seal on the cover. Uh? No,
(19:01):
is that is that a new novel? That's like, you know,
the self help thing? Right? Oh? Is this the thing
about like if you put a positive vibe out in
the world, someone will give you a million dollars? I
think so. I have not read it myself, so I'm
not privy to the actual secret, but I understand that
that's basically the secret that if you put out that
positive intergy. I think it is. But it kind of
(19:21):
gets into the same area that you see with a
lot of self help books, and that's the idea that
if you if you believe in something, you can make
it real, that you can you can change yourself or
even change reality through the strong sense of belief and
positive vibes and uh, you know, to a certain extent,
there's often a lot of kind of New age hokery
going on in that. But as we're going to discuss here,
(19:42):
there's also this core of reality as it comes to
our ability to manipulate memories. And in this case, it's
not necessarily believing in your narrative, it's understanding your narrative.
And again, this is why that memory keeps knocking around
and saying, hey, look at me, I'm flagged because I'm important.
Don't quite understand what's going on here. This is troublesome
(20:02):
for me. Right, So there's this other approach to story editing,
and it is to write and then rewrite your narrative.
James Penna Baker of the University of Texas has pioneered
a really expressive writing technique that helps people recover from
past traumas by helping them reframe and reinterpret those events.
(20:24):
And there's a link that if you just search for
writing and help some practical advice, you will see this
prompt for writing in the idea is that for four
days in a row, fifteen minutes each you take a
topic that you that's been bothering you, um, that you
really want to explore more about, and you just write
about it, and you write really as honestly and as
(20:48):
fully as you can. Yeah, and now what would you
write about? Some of the examples they give would be
to write about something that you're thinking or worrying about
too much. So maybe you're worrying about, you know, taxes
coming up and to you know, settle down and figure
those out. Or uh, you're something that you're dreaming about,
Say you wanted to actually do something about that nagging
dream where you forgot that you signed up for a
(21:10):
class in school until right at the end at finals,
you know, or or the the you know, the wearing
underwear or nothing to your math class kind of dream.
Other possibilities to write about include something you feel is
affecting your life in an unhealthy way, be it something
you know, like a personal habit, or something outside yourself,
or something that you have been avoiding for days, weeks,
(21:32):
or years. Tackling at fifteen minutes a day for four
days in writing form. Okay, so it's interesting because what
happens is that the first time you write, you will
might write the thing that's bothering you, and you might
touch on the thing that is actually the thing that's
bothering you, because most often when you think that there's
a topic that that's really the problem, there's an underlying issue,
(21:54):
and so returning to that issue four days in a
row it gives you more insight. You're peeling away the
layers of the onion of of that actual problem, and
in the process you're creating some sort of understanding for yourself.
You are reframing that narrative so that it makes sense.
If something bad happened to you in your past and
(22:14):
it keeps coming up again and again, writing about it
really forces you to reflect on it and not say, oh,
this was justified, it should have happened. That's not what
we're saying here. It just gives you more of an
understanding of why it happened, and hopefully people suffer less
as a result. That's the idea. Yeah, it's um. It's
(22:38):
interesting because anyone who's ever engaged in your writing, you
see versions of this, say, in trying to create poetry,
like any kind of poetry that has like a personal um,
a bit of energy to it, And I feel like
most poetry of any work does. But one of my
poetry professors in college I remember them saying, and this
(22:58):
wasn't like a across the board rule, but they tended
to imply that you're generally better off removing the first
four lines or so of your poem, because the first
four lines are your poem. Are you trying to write
what you think you're going to write about, and then
after you get past those first four lines, then you
start writing about what's really going on. So so the
(23:19):
first four lines are in this case are the thing
that you think you're afraid of, and then you begin
to get after that into what you're actually afraid of.
I think about it is the quick and dirty way
to psychoanalysis. Yeah, yeah, because and I'm not going to
share with you what I wrote about, because that would
be like revealing a dream and everybody would get bored.
But I can tell you that when I did this,
you know, it was about this one thing that I
(23:40):
thought it was about, but really it was about social rejection.
And then it became like, well, what are my relationships
like in my life? How's how has this colored this?
And when did this happen? And when I was a teenager,
was it like this, And we've discussed about the teenage brain,
about how social rejection is processes actual physical pain, and
maybe these things stay with you and so on and
so forth. And those four days I got a lot
(24:01):
out of this one tiny little thing that I thought
I was bothered by, but I couldn't figure out why
I kept dreaming about this thing. And that is really
a very effective strategy at trying to get at your
memory and trying to re contextualized your your narrative in
your life and ultimately perhaps solve this Rubik's cube or
(24:24):
create a solved Rubik's cube out of these memories and
then you can put it on the shelf and it's
not gonna bother you anymore. Uh. When we were prepping
for this one, we brought up the whole situation of
why does why does it bother us so much when
we overhear part of a conversation. We've talked about this before. Uh.
The reason supposedly is that you're not getting all the
information about the scenario, and your mind desperately wants to
(24:47):
make sense of this nugget of weirdness that you just
listen in on. And that's what some of these memories
are like that were our mind wants to understand why
did this happen to me? Why? Why am I afraid
of this? You know, these questions linger with these troubling,
persistent memories. Our brains want to figure out the puzzle.
They want the extra information to make it, make it lock,
(25:08):
to make the Rubik's Cuba clear out. Uh and uh.
And what these experiments are about are about taking the
time to fill them out and to and to add
the necessary information to make them whold. Yeah, And that's
why these why these writing pumps are are so effective. Now,
Wilson says, a third approach is the do good, be
good method. And it's the principle that our attitudes and
(25:31):
our beliefs follow from our behaviors rather than precede them.
So if you want to change your narrative, then you
should change some of the things that you do so
that it sort of informs your unconscious Like I'm a
good person and I volunteer you here, and I'm doing this,
and you know, I'm trying to cultivate the following traits
in my life and everything else should follow well. And
(25:55):
then I mean also that, in my opinion, often has
the added benefit if you are if your your problem
is that you're too much inside your own mental space,
if you start concerning yourself with other people, then you're
getting out of that that that self inflicted cage of
self a bit so, and it is the cage of
self really really, uh So why does this work? There?
(26:16):
You know, there's no definitive like it's it's doing this,
it's engaging the following part of your brain. Probably this
is the best guess is that it works because again,
you are completing that picture for yourself. So your brain,
if you if it doesn't have to red flag and
memory because it understands it in the context that you've
put it into the narrative and it's happy with that.
(26:36):
It can move along and go to the next thing
that you flagged in your brain. So that's the idea
of why it works. Yeah, I guess you just need
to make sure you form the correct, a helpful, finished
version of that memory. So like if I was concerned
about the guy about a hot dog from yesterday being grumpy,
like I would want to frame that in the forum
of well he was he was probably having a bad
(26:57):
day and just took that out on me, rather than
I'm a bad person, and therefore hot dog vendors are
mean to me. They are generally like they I don't
know if you know, but they have a little slip
that they circulate among them. That says Robert Lamb. Yeah,
all right. There's a great article called Revising Your Story
by Kirsten Weir and uh. She says, basically, if you
you doubt the story um powers here in these story prompts,
(27:20):
you should look at this um example by researcher Daphne
being Nicktoll at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She
works with parents who are at risk for child abuse,
and she added some story prompting to home visits of
parents with newborns, and the prompt involved getting parents to
reinterpret why their babies were cranky or difficult. So parents,
(27:41):
for instance, might blame their babies babies and say, oh,
he's just trying to provoke me. So the home visitor
would ask parents if they could think of any other reasons,
prompting them to attribute their baby's behavior to situational factors
were talking about like maybe you didn't burp him enough,
so on and so forth, giving them a different narrative
and among both a control group and those who participated
(28:04):
in this program about of the parents physically abused their children. Now,
in the group that got the story prompt giving them
these these other versions of why their babies might be
acting the way they were, their percentage dropped to four.
That's again how powerful it is to replace one narrative
with another. Very cool, Very cool. Now this flows in
(28:28):
nicely to this idea that Carol Dweck presents, this idea
of fixed versus growth mindset. You want to lay that
out for everyone here. Yeah, we've talked about Carol Dweck before. UM.
She she's a psychologist who has talked about the praise
paradox um. You know this idea that empty praise can
give your child this for self esteem problem. You think
(28:50):
the opposite. You think you're saying, hey, you're doing great,
that your kid's gonna have tons of self esteem, But
really empty praise isn't constructive and anyway, it builds up
this whole idea that your kids might be doing something wrong.
Carol Dwet kind of goes a little bit further into
this idea of self esteem and um success and she
talked about how some people have a fixed mindset. They
(29:10):
believe their intelligence and traits are set in stone, and
this actually gets in the way of how they see
the world and they move through it. And she said
that these people they typically try to to look smart
um and not make any mistakes, and as a result,
they don't take any risks. And now, she says, on
the other hand, you have something called a growth mindset,
(29:31):
and this means that you're willing to change your narrative
and cultivate new ideas and talent through effort and instruction.
So in this way, you see obviously there's a flexibility.
There's this willingness to say I don't have all of
the information and I'm going to change my story. And
she says this allows people to be both more resilient
and vulnerable at the same time, and able to take
(29:53):
on more challenges and just kind of, like I said,
change that narrative of what you your life to be. Yeah,
I think it's a it's it's a really interesting way
to look at to two types of people. You know,
the idea that am I looking at myself as I
am now, as the finished product, you know, or or
is it an ongoing journey? And that's kind of I mean,
(30:14):
I guess that kind of sounds a little new a
g and hippy dippy, but but really, I mean, life
is a journey. We continue to change. We're always changing physically, emotionally.
The person we are now is not the same person
we were a month ago, a year ago. And and
so if you if you try and approach your life
as a fixed object, yeah, you're just going to run
(30:36):
into increasing um frustration because you're gonna come up against challenges.
And if you if you think that this is what
I am and this is all I am, then a
challenge is an affront to your strength. But if you
see yourself as changing, as you see yourself as perpetually evolving,
then a challenge is just another opportunity to grow. Yeah.
She says that some people have fixed mindsets for for
(31:00):
some of the things in their life, and then growth
mindsets for for other things. Yeah. So it's sort of
one of those self checks of well, you know, my
flexible in this one area of my life and inflexible
in the other. But the main thing, she says is
that things do not come naturally, and that thinking that
they do is a male adaptive mindset of mal adaptive
(31:22):
mindset and that we we are looking at it entirely wrong.
And I can't help but think of the stories that
we consume, that we feed feed on, you know, to
to inform who we are and how we fit into
the world, because there are certainly we can think of
any number of movies, TV shows, stories, myths in which
(31:42):
there's an individual with a natural talent, and then how
healthy is that too? To absorb that story and then
compare it to our own. Well, I mean, you know,
it's the matrix, the one. Are you the one? Were
you born? The one? But then that idea is very
old and has been perpetuated for for for thousands the
thousands of years, and I think it's ultimately why we
(32:03):
we want a film where where we want a story
where a hero has to work for it, uh, where
a hero has to has to actually go through a
training montage in order to defeat the villain, because that's
more in keeping with life. You're gonna have to work
for the things that you achieve well and not to
keep going back to Star Wars and I feel like
that's been the theme today. But Luke Skywalker, right, didn't
just fall on the womb, you know, with the force.
(32:25):
He had to work at it, and Yoda made him
look a fool over there in Dagoba. Yeah, he lost
a hand, he did made him a lot of the
characters in his hands really dark. Did they lost hands?
If you go through again my daughter's encyclopedia, you will see,
you know, so and so had their hand repaired. But well, yeah,
there's Luke, there's Vader. Yeah, um, some dude in the
(32:48):
bar and the first one Lungin. Maybe I don't know.
I think you just got run through that one. I'll
ask my daughter, Okay, get home, all right, Well there
you go. Story editing. I think this is a great
episode because it really lays out a very achievable way
to uh to to do something that might otherwise seem
(33:08):
like something out of science fiction, a way to change
our memories, to change the way that we interpret the past.
Um and uh and so I challenge, you know, anyone
who is is dealing with with some sort of problem
in their life to consider trying this out. You know,
don't see it as your only solution, but but give
it a go and see what what can be done. Yeah,
(33:29):
and if you again, you want to check out that
story prompt by James Penna Baker. Just google his name
and then perhaps writing and health some practical advice. All right,
let's call the robot over here and do a quick
bit of listener mail. All right, we have a quick
one from Alex. He says, Hello, Robert and Julie. I
hope your day is going well. I've been a listener
(33:49):
of stuff to ab All your Mind for about four months.
I loved your podcast so much I even went back
as far as two years ago and listen to your
allowing your podcast. H First off, let me thank you
for being so respectful when you talk about cultures and religions.
This personally means a lot to me. I am not
religious really, but I am very aware and sensitive when
talking about religion or culture. Also have a topic for you.
Guys are sociopath slash psychopaths biologically and neurologically doomed. Is
(34:14):
there any hope for these unlucky people born this way?
Is a sociopath psychopath the ultimate apex predator of our species.
I think this would be a really interesting study, to
say the least. And Uh. Alex goes on to say,
thanks for your time, keep doing what you do. Thank you,
Alex That is very interesting because we talked recently about
how Luis c. K has a bit in his stand
(34:36):
up about how we're really lucky that we got out
of the food chain. We are the apex predator. Now
we don't have to worry about it, but you know
one another, we're sort of a problem. We know that
we tend to main and kill each other. And then
there's this idea psychologically, is someone who's a sociopath who
has no community ties, a lack of empathy a predator
(34:58):
in a sense. Yeah, that's it's certainly a topic we
could explore. I know they were for certain there were
at least a couple of really interesting studies to come
out on sociopaths uh in the in the past year
that that I'd looked podcast on at some point in
the future. Indeed, yes, and maybe that will show up
fairly soon. All right, So there you have it. If
(35:20):
you have anything you would like to add on this
topic on other topics, then you know where to find.
It's got to stuff to blow your mind dot com.
That's the mothership. That's where you find all the podcast episodes,
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(35:40):
a more old fashioned way, where would they find us? Ethan?
Send your narrative to us that blow the mind at
discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Julie Ducklas, and
this week we're talking about memory editing. And if this
were your average science journalism story, you would inevitably start
(00:27):
with a reference to Eternal Sunshine of the Spot Spot
was Mine. You know, have you have you noticed this trend?
Like any story that relates at all to changing memories
or racing memories, they will name drop that film in
the lead. Well, because it was such an intriguing idea
that you could, uh you could alter or completely remove
(00:47):
a memory that had been dogging you your entire life. Yeah,
it's true. But I you know, I feel like there
have been enough stories about like changing memories and and
and and what memories actually are, that we don't need
that film as the reference point anymore for an actual
story about the science of memory and the science of
altering memory. I always feel like a little bit insulted.
(01:10):
You know. It's like someone's like, hey, so if you've
seen let me tell you about space. You've seen Star Wars, right, Like,
you don't have to start with Star wars. We live
in a the world. We're surrounded by space, alright, Alright,
so I think, and maybe I'm projecting my own feelings
on here, is that the problem is that the spotless
mind idea is it's erroneous. And it takes this idea
(01:30):
that you could like return your mind to some pristine
platonic state, right where everything is completely new and fresh.
But that is not the case. Our minds are the
cages that we have. But it turns out that we
can actually tame them to a certain degree. We can't erase,
we can't make them spotless, but we can make them
(01:53):
a little bit more manageable. The problem is just just
this inherent misunderstanding of what memory is in the first place.
And I was looking at this survey that was published
in two thousand eleven by PLS so one found that
almost two thirds of Americans believe that memory works like
a video camera and that it's like we're recording events
so we can review them later. Yeah, it's not so
(02:16):
at all. And we've we've discussed the science of memory
um a good bit in previous episodes. Off to make
sure I throw some of those back up on the
website and on the social media pages around the time
this episode publishes. But indeed, we've talked before about the
seven Sins of memory. Uh. These of course were brought
to mind by Daniel Shackter, the former chair of Harvard
(02:38):
University Psychology Psychology Department and author of the book The
Seven Sins of Memories Cohen How the Mind forgets and remembers,
and he mentions, uh, these seven just seven ways that
all our memories are uh untrustworthy at the very least.
For instance, there's transience, So that's the weakening or loss
of memory over time. What you have for lunch eight
(03:00):
years ago today, the side of sweet potatoes there human
sprinkling on top. Okay, well that was a really good
sandwich apparently, so that was stuck with you. But for
the most part, these memories just fade over time. It's
just how it works. And then there's absent mindedness. Uh
so this involves attention in memory. We're just not paying
attention to what's going on around it, so we're not
(03:21):
getting all the data. There's blocking, that's the failed attempt
to recall tidbits of memory a face, a name, Etceterates
on the tip of my tongue. But I can't remember
what it is. Uh. There's misattribution. This is when we
recall an authentic memory, but then aspects of it are misattributed.
And this includes scenarios such as incorrect incorrect time or
place identity, misattribution, or confusion over the originator of an idea.
(03:45):
We've all had those conversations where you're telling a story
about something that you think happened to you and it
turns out it's happening to the person you you're you're
speaking to, or you have some very pivotal detail of
the story completely backwards, like oh, that trip that wasn't
a trip I took with this person, was a trip
I took with this person. It wasn't this past girlfriend,
it was this past girlfriend, or you know, whatever the
scenario might be. And then there's suggestibility. Our minds are
(04:10):
and our memories entirely susceptible yes to to suggestions. So
you were to say it enough times, I might either
actually get a astronomy sandwich for lunch or falsely remember
that I had one. There's bias, uh, and that you
see this all the time in people's memories of crimes.
(04:30):
If they have a particular bias in mind regarding uh uh, say,
the racial profiling of suspects, then that's going to have
an influence on how they remember the crime that occurred.
And then there's persistence, and that's the unwanted recall of
information that's disturbing and that actually ties in a lot
with what we're gonna talk about in this episode. So
there are all these ways that our memory is pretty
(04:53):
much jack from the get go. And to your your point,
so many people think it's just all a bunch of
video information and stored in her head, which which couldn't
be further from the truth. Yeah, there's that great cognitive
psychology experiment that was done by Daniel Simon's and Christopher
Chebery's that showed how selective attention works. You probably heard
(05:14):
about this. There's a video of people with white shirt
song and a video of people with black shirt song
and they were playing I think basketball or something like. Yeah,
I watched it, but I really wasn't paying that much attention. Okay,
well then you if you were, if you were doing
it as as they instructed, you were probably looking at
the white shirted team, right. You were told to really
(05:34):
figure out how many passes were made between the members
of this white shirted team and you probably, as participants did,
did not notice the gorilla walking through the clutch of
white shirted and black short players. So this is a
good example of attention and selective attention and memory. Yeah,
there are a number of these type of pranks that
(05:57):
you see carried out and that you can find them
on YouTube once where they'll take say an individual will
be sort of in the background for a person and
then they'll like switch out the person playing that part
to see if they notice. And it's it's phenomenal how
how often people do not notice. Um. There's a British
television series called The Black Mirror, which we've mentioned before,
and there's an episode titled The Entire History of You,
(06:19):
and in this near future sci fi vision of reality,
most people have this little electronic device called a grain
implanted uh in their brain and it basically collects constant
video of their life and then you can go back
and replay the video, which of course ends up having
(06:41):
disastrous um consequences for the characters in this particular episode.
But it's it's very interesting that model because they they
in this episode they create a sci fi technological version
of memory that is in keeping with the with the
way most people think memory is right, and in fact
it's not. As you said, there are seven sins of memory.
(07:02):
And really, if you think about it, we are the
magicians of memory because we have misdirection and misp misperception,
and then we try to piece together this pattern that
makes sense to us, and boom, you have this manufactured
reality that comes out on a plate for you. Um.
And the thing is is that we continue to take
this memory out and look at it all the time.
(07:25):
In fact, every time you take out a memory, you
change it a bit. Yes, yeah, I've we mentioned before
that don't think of your memory as a little stone
sculpture that you keep in a drawer. It's a sculpture
made out of clay. Every time you take it out,
you're jabbing it, you're changing it. You're bringing new information,
new interpretation into that memory. And then you put it back.
(07:46):
And so so every time you draw it out, you're
you're changing, you're getting it a little bit further removed
from the actual reality. And here's the thing. These memories
are the foundation of the story of who you are, right,
and so this is where emotional health and something called
story editing comes in because there's this idea that you
can change your memory and maybe even alter your future.
(08:10):
And we'll get more into that, but before we do,
I want to discuss a little bit about why we
take these memories out in the first place and sort
of obsess over them. And in order to do that,
you gotta go to Papa Freud. Yeah, and it's great because,
in classic Freud's style, he goes right to your childhood, right,
oh yeah, yeah. In fact, um, in beyond the pleasure principle,
Freud actually documents his grandson's particular habit of taking his
(08:35):
toys and hiding them or throwing them away. And when
he does that, um, his grandson says forth, meaning gone.
And then he watches his grandson um taking them back
and saying, dah, they're here. So, in this one particular
instance and beyond the pleasure principle, his grandson has like
I think, it's just like a real with a string
(08:55):
tied to it, and he's in his crib and over
and over again he does the dog game. He throws
that spool away and then he reels it back in.
And so what Freud says is that the kid is
actually um marking a cultural achievement here because the kid
is equating this and just stay with me on this,
(09:16):
uh that this fort doab has gone and back with
his mom and his mom leaving him but coming back
and saying that he's getting far more pleasure from the
daw part the coming back part, and so he's mastering
control over his emotions at his mother sometimes disappearing or
(09:36):
having to leave the room. And this idea that that
you know, your your main caregiver might not come back
or come back, that's that's pretty fascinating uh interpretation, and
especially since the father of a nearly two year old
who's really into that the whole casting of objects and
then also playing hide and go seek with like a
(09:58):
stuffed cat and that we have in the house. It
really loves to be who go, Where's where's fat cat?
Where's fat cat go? Oh? Well, fat cats under the
slide and then it's you know, tremendously um entertaining to
him defined the cat that was barely hidden. Yeah, So
this is a huge lesson for humans that life is ephemeral.
Things come, things go, people come, and people go, And
(10:19):
this really ties into the idea of repetition compulsion and mastery,
and maybe, just maybe that's why we continue to take out,
in particular traumatic memories bother some memories, and we look
at them and examine them over and over again, each
time hoping to get a better understanding. But the problem
(10:41):
is that, especially according to Freud, those memories are unconscious.
They are buried and they are hidden, and so you
just kind of get these little crumbs of your unconscious.
But then you have someone by the name of Timothy D. Wilson,
this is a University of Virginia psychologists, who says this
unconscious or unconscious as he calls it, is off limits
(11:03):
to us. So it's really only through conscious thoughts that
we can change the mechanisms of the unconscious world for us. Mm.
So he has this idea of, for instance, if you
establish regular acts of kindness, that you could tease out
progressive changes in behavior as determined by your unconscious. So
(11:26):
now we're talking about changing your behavior through your story
of yourself. Yes, yes, yeah, And this is what this
is where everything really gets interesting here, because essentially we
are getting into that eternal sunshine of the spotless mind territory.
But instead of changing your memories through the use of
lasers or or a little bit of a little tiny
(11:48):
electronic device that goes in your brain as in Black Mirror.
It's about thinking about it is that I'm using your
actual mental architecture as it exists, your actual mental machinery, uh,
that you have in your head, and using it to
alter memory, using the weakness of memory as a strength.
Really yeah, and it's really effective, as we will discuss UM.
(12:08):
Wilson in his two thousand eleven book Redirect, The Surprising
New Science of Psychological Change, looks at why programs like
Scared Straight, you know, the taking the at risk youth
to prisons and trying to scare them straight, why those
sort of programs fail, and why story editing just having
those kids change their story, their narrative maybe a far
(12:30):
more effective strategy. Yeah. Yeah, I've been reading a little
bit about this, uh to it in regards to children,
like the dangers of labeling um, particularly reading an article
on biting and about how just the one thing they
always advises and dealing with biting, which which is a
pretty common occurrence with with children, especially as their acquiring
language and learning how to better express themselves, uh than
(12:53):
by simply you know, fighting into something is that. But
there's there's always this danger of referring to them as
a bitter, because then that comes their story and they
can interpret interpret that, even at a very young age,
and they say, oh, I'm a buyer, So I bite
in the same way that one might think, oh, well
I'm you know, I'm destined to wind up in a
in a prison, so I guess I will. This is
the this is what I am. I guess that's what
(13:14):
I'm going to be. Well, you know that's interesting because
this is that is exactly at This is this idea
that you you put this narrative in place and then
you follow it to the letter and you become it.
And Wilson first discovered this power of story editing in
the eighties when he found that struggling students had fallen
for the same old narrative, I'm bad at school, which
(13:34):
was driving this sort of self defeating cycle. And he
gave forties students, these students who were not doing well
in school a new narrative, which was everyone fails at first. Okay,
so that recast the whole idea, Wait, what I may
not be bad at school? Everyone fails at first. This
is a thing. So suddenly these students are being introduced
(13:55):
to this new idea. And he had the students read
accounts from other students had who had struggled with grades
and then improved. There's also videotape footage of other students
who relay their tales of eventual academic success. And the
results were pretty astounding. The students who received the information,
compared to those who did not A were significantly less
(14:16):
apt to leave college by the end of their sophomore year.
Be they had a significantly greater increase in grade point
average even one year after the study. And see they
performed significantly better on sample items from the g r
E or the Graduate Record Exam. And this is all
from a thirty minute session, one thirty minute session which
(14:38):
had staying power even one year after. And this just
shows you how important priming is really. And I was
thinking about this University Michigan study, and this study they
had students with the same abilities and perform its splinter
into two groups. The first was told that men performed
better than women on math tests. The second was told
that no matter what they might have heard, there was
(14:59):
no difference and abilities among the two genders than they
were given the math test, and in the first group,
men outscored women by twenty points. In the second group,
the one that was told no matter what they had heard,
that the abilities are the same, they were outscored only
by two points. I mean, that's a huge difference. And
that's just from that one priming example and indeed stressing
(15:23):
the point of thinking for yourself and questioning authority, not
questioning authority in the sense that I'm going to, you know,
break a law, just because if they were questioning the
established script that is handed down to us about who
you are, what you are, what you're capable of achieving.
And uh, and yeah, there's just something almost endlessly powerful
about being able to to sort of break free of
(15:44):
those chains. Yeah. I mean if you think about it,
like in in Um some of your most um, how
shows it the delicate situations in life where you were
really struggling with someone or something, if someone came and
gave you as script or just even this this idea,
(16:04):
this other narrative of hey, another perception, how could that
have changed your life? That's how powerful this is. Now
another area that this becomes important again you mentioned earlier
how arguably a lot of the stuff is going on
into some subconscious level. There's there's say a bad memory,
scarring memory, traumatic memory, even that is keeps popping up
(16:27):
again and again, this persistent memory, and it's it's kind
of like a Rubic's cube, but not a Rubics cube
that you ever sit down and say, all right, I'm
gonna sit down and solve this thing. But it's one
that's just always sitting on your desk or is in
the drawer that you're always opening, and it's there. It's
it's it's seemingly unsolvable and uh, and you may tinker
with it for a minute and then put it back.
You're right, So your mind is tinkering with it mostly
(16:51):
the unconscious level, but every once in a while it surfaces.
Can you become aware of this thing that's bothering you?
So it just this this persistent um a bit of
annoyance or or even just nagging depression. Anytime when we
we cover a topic like this, always think back to
Alan Robe grulay novel Jealousy, and it's a it's an
(17:11):
experimental novel. Um. I don't recommend picking up and reading
it unless you know what you're getting into. Just style
wise because it's a it's a little unorthodox. But the
entire novel is this this man who owns a banana plantation,
and he's looking through Venetian blinds observing his wife and
trying to figure out if she's having an affair with
(17:33):
the guy who runs the neighboring banana plantation. And and
so it's just him poring over what he knows and
how little he knows, over and over again, uh, and
occasionally observing a smeared centipede on the wall and trying
to decide what he should do. And the in spoiler,
the entire novel passes and he doesn't decide what he's
(17:53):
gonna do. He's just this just this endless nagging frustration
over how little he knows and now and and that's
kind of what happens in these cases. We have limited
amount of information. It's kind of like the cock Snowflake
that we talked about Snowflake episode. There's only so much
information you may know about a given situation, and unless
you actually were to go outside of that bubble of knowledge, um,
(18:16):
you're never going to solve it. So so again, these
these problems, these memories, these uh, they just exist there
in the in the peripheries, and and it's only through
actually tackling them that we can alter them into a
shape that fits in and kind of vanishes into the background. Okay,
we're gonna take a quick break, and when we get back,
(18:38):
we're going to talk about how you can actually get
outside of that bubble of knowledge, change your narrative, and
perhaps change your life. All Right, we're back, Julie. Have
you read The Secret, The Secret, The Secret, the one
with the little like the red wax seal on the cover. Uh? No,
(19:01):
is that is that a new novel? That's like, you know,
the self help thing? Right? Oh? Is this the thing
about like if you put a positive vibe out in
the world, someone will give you a million dollars? I
think so. I have not read it myself, so I'm
not privy to the actual secret, but I understand that
that's basically the secret that if you put out that
positive intergy. I think it is. But it kind of
(19:21):
gets into the same area that you see with a
lot of self help books, and that's the idea that
if you if you believe in something, you can make
it real, that you can you can change yourself or
even change reality through the strong sense of belief and
positive vibes and uh, you know, to a certain extent,
there's often a lot of kind of New age hokery
going on in that. But as we're going to discuss here,
(19:42):
there's also this core of reality as it comes to
our ability to manipulate memories. And in this case, it's
not necessarily believing in your narrative, it's understanding your narrative.
And again, this is why that memory keeps knocking around
and saying, hey, look at me, I'm flagged because I'm important.
Don't quite understand what's going on here. This is troublesome
(20:02):
for me. Right, So there's this other approach to story editing,
and it is to write and then rewrite your narrative.
James Penna Baker of the University of Texas has pioneered
a really expressive writing technique that helps people recover from
past traumas by helping them reframe and reinterpret those events.
(20:24):
And there's a link that if you just search for
writing and help some practical advice, you will see this
prompt for writing in the idea is that for four
days in a row, fifteen minutes each you take a
topic that you that's been bothering you, um, that you
really want to explore more about, and you just write
about it, and you write really as honestly and as
(20:48):
fully as you can. Yeah, and now what would you
write about? Some of the examples they give would be
to write about something that you're thinking or worrying about
too much. So maybe you're worrying about, you know, taxes
coming up and to you know, settle down and figure
those out. Or uh, you're something that you're dreaming about,
Say you wanted to actually do something about that nagging
dream where you forgot that you signed up for a
(21:10):
class in school until right at the end at finals,
you know, or or the the you know, the wearing
underwear or nothing to your math class kind of dream.
Other possibilities to write about include something you feel is
affecting your life in an unhealthy way, be it something
you know, like a personal habit, or something outside yourself,
or something that you have been avoiding for days, weeks,
(21:32):
or years. Tackling at fifteen minutes a day for four
days in writing form. Okay, so it's interesting because what
happens is that the first time you write, you will
might write the thing that's bothering you, and you might
touch on the thing that is actually the thing that's
bothering you, because most often when you think that there's
a topic that that's really the problem, there's an underlying issue,
(21:54):
and so returning to that issue four days in a
row it gives you more insight. You're peeling away the
layers of the onion of of that actual problem, and
in the process you're creating some sort of understanding for yourself.
You are reframing that narrative so that it makes sense.
If something bad happened to you in your past and
(22:14):
it keeps coming up again and again, writing about it
really forces you to reflect on it and not say, oh,
this was justified, it should have happened. That's not what
we're saying here. It just gives you more of an
understanding of why it happened, and hopefully people suffer less
as a result. That's the idea. Yeah, it's um. It's
(22:38):
interesting because anyone who's ever engaged in your writing, you
see versions of this, say, in trying to create poetry,
like any kind of poetry that has like a personal um,
a bit of energy to it, And I feel like
most poetry of any work does. But one of my
poetry professors in college I remember them saying, and this
(22:58):
wasn't like a across the board rule, but they tended
to imply that you're generally better off removing the first
four lines or so of your poem, because the first
four lines are your poem. Are you trying to write
what you think you're going to write about, and then
after you get past those first four lines, then you
start writing about what's really going on. So so the
(23:19):
first four lines are in this case are the thing
that you think you're afraid of, and then you begin
to get after that into what you're actually afraid of.
I think about it is the quick and dirty way
to psychoanalysis. Yeah, yeah, because and I'm not going to
share with you what I wrote about, because that would
be like revealing a dream and everybody would get bored.
But I can tell you that when I did this,
you know, it was about this one thing that I
(23:40):
thought it was about, but really it was about social rejection.
And then it became like, well, what are my relationships
like in my life? How's how has this colored this?
And when did this happen? And when I was a teenager,
was it like this, And we've discussed about the teenage brain,
about how social rejection is processes actual physical pain, and
maybe these things stay with you and so on and
so forth. And those four days I got a lot
(24:01):
out of this one tiny little thing that I thought
I was bothered by, but I couldn't figure out why
I kept dreaming about this thing. And that is really
a very effective strategy at trying to get at your
memory and trying to re contextualized your your narrative in
your life and ultimately perhaps solve this Rubik's cube or
(24:24):
create a solved Rubik's cube out of these memories and
then you can put it on the shelf and it's
not gonna bother you anymore. Uh. When we were prepping
for this one, we brought up the whole situation of
why does why does it bother us so much when
we overhear part of a conversation. We've talked about this before. Uh.
The reason supposedly is that you're not getting all the
information about the scenario, and your mind desperately wants to
(24:47):
make sense of this nugget of weirdness that you just
listen in on. And that's what some of these memories
are like that were our mind wants to understand why
did this happen to me? Why? Why am I afraid
of this? You know, these questions linger with these troubling,
persistent memories. Our brains want to figure out the puzzle.
They want the extra information to make it, make it lock,
(25:08):
to make the Rubik's Cuba clear out. Uh and uh.
And what these experiments are about are about taking the
time to fill them out and to and to add
the necessary information to make them whold. Yeah, And that's
why these why these writing pumps are are so effective. Now,
Wilson says, a third approach is the do good, be
good method. And it's the principle that our attitudes and
(25:31):
our beliefs follow from our behaviors rather than precede them.
So if you want to change your narrative, then you
should change some of the things that you do so
that it sort of informs your unconscious Like I'm a
good person and I volunteer you here, and I'm doing this,
and you know, I'm trying to cultivate the following traits
in my life and everything else should follow well. And
(25:55):
then I mean also that, in my opinion, often has
the added benefit if you are if your your problem
is that you're too much inside your own mental space,
if you start concerning yourself with other people, then you're
getting out of that that that self inflicted cage of
self a bit so, and it is the cage of
self really really, uh So why does this work? There?
(26:16):
You know, there's no definitive like it's it's doing this,
it's engaging the following part of your brain. Probably this
is the best guess is that it works because again,
you are completing that picture for yourself. So your brain,
if you if it doesn't have to red flag and
memory because it understands it in the context that you've
put it into the narrative and it's happy with that.
(26:36):
It can move along and go to the next thing
that you flagged in your brain. So that's the idea
of why it works. Yeah, I guess you just need
to make sure you form the correct, a helpful, finished
version of that memory. So like if I was concerned
about the guy about a hot dog from yesterday being grumpy,
like I would want to frame that in the forum
of well he was he was probably having a bad
(26:57):
day and just took that out on me, rather than
I'm a bad person, and therefore hot dog vendors are
mean to me. They are generally like they I don't
know if you know, but they have a little slip
that they circulate among them. That says Robert Lamb. Yeah,
all right. There's a great article called Revising Your Story
by Kirsten Weir and uh. She says, basically, if you
you doubt the story um powers here in these story prompts,
(27:20):
you should look at this um example by researcher Daphne
being Nicktoll at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She
works with parents who are at risk for child abuse,
and she added some story prompting to home visits of
parents with newborns, and the prompt involved getting parents to
reinterpret why their babies were cranky or difficult. So parents,
(27:41):
for instance, might blame their babies babies and say, oh,
he's just trying to provoke me. So the home visitor
would ask parents if they could think of any other reasons,
prompting them to attribute their baby's behavior to situational factors
were talking about like maybe you didn't burp him enough,
so on and so forth, giving them a different narrative
and among both a control group and those who participated
(28:04):
in this program about of the parents physically abused their children. Now,
in the group that got the story prompt giving them
these these other versions of why their babies might be
acting the way they were, their percentage dropped to four.
That's again how powerful it is to replace one narrative
with another. Very cool, Very cool. Now this flows in
(28:28):
nicely to this idea that Carol Dweck presents, this idea
of fixed versus growth mindset. You want to lay that
out for everyone here. Yeah, we've talked about Carol Dweck before. UM.
She she's a psychologist who has talked about the praise
paradox um. You know this idea that empty praise can
give your child this for self esteem problem. You think
(28:50):
the opposite. You think you're saying, hey, you're doing great,
that your kid's gonna have tons of self esteem, But
really empty praise isn't constructive and anyway, it builds up
this whole idea that your kids might be doing something wrong.
Carol Dwet kind of goes a little bit further into
this idea of self esteem and um success and she
talked about how some people have a fixed mindset. They
(29:10):
believe their intelligence and traits are set in stone, and
this actually gets in the way of how they see
the world and they move through it. And she said
that these people they typically try to to look smart
um and not make any mistakes, and as a result,
they don't take any risks. And now, she says, on
the other hand, you have something called a growth mindset,
(29:31):
and this means that you're willing to change your narrative
and cultivate new ideas and talent through effort and instruction.
So in this way, you see obviously there's a flexibility.
There's this willingness to say I don't have all of
the information and I'm going to change my story. And
she says this allows people to be both more resilient
and vulnerable at the same time, and able to take
(29:53):
on more challenges and just kind of, like I said,
change that narrative of what you your life to be. Yeah,
I think it's a it's it's a really interesting way
to look at to two types of people. You know,
the idea that am I looking at myself as I
am now, as the finished product, you know, or or
is it an ongoing journey? And that's kind of I mean,
(30:14):
I guess that kind of sounds a little new a
g and hippy dippy, but but really, I mean, life
is a journey. We continue to change. We're always changing physically, emotionally.
The person we are now is not the same person
we were a month ago, a year ago. And and
so if you if you try and approach your life
as a fixed object, yeah, you're just going to run
(30:36):
into increasing um frustration because you're gonna come up against challenges.
And if you if you think that this is what
I am and this is all I am, then a
challenge is an affront to your strength. But if you
see yourself as changing, as you see yourself as perpetually evolving,
then a challenge is just another opportunity to grow. Yeah.
She says that some people have fixed mindsets for for
(31:00):
some of the things in their life, and then growth
mindsets for for other things. Yeah. So it's sort of
one of those self checks of well, you know, my
flexible in this one area of my life and inflexible
in the other. But the main thing, she says is
that things do not come naturally, and that thinking that
they do is a male adaptive mindset of mal adaptive
(31:22):
mindset and that we we are looking at it entirely wrong.
And I can't help but think of the stories that
we consume, that we feed feed on, you know, to
to inform who we are and how we fit into
the world, because there are certainly we can think of
any number of movies, TV shows, stories, myths in which
(31:42):
there's an individual with a natural talent, and then how
healthy is that too? To absorb that story and then
compare it to our own. Well, I mean, you know,
it's the matrix, the one. Are you the one? Were
you born? The one? But then that idea is very
old and has been perpetuated for for for thousands the
thousands of years, and I think it's ultimately why we
(32:03):
we want a film where where we want a story
where a hero has to work for it, uh, where
a hero has to has to actually go through a
training montage in order to defeat the villain, because that's
more in keeping with life. You're gonna have to work
for the things that you achieve well and not to
keep going back to Star Wars and I feel like
that's been the theme today. But Luke Skywalker, right, didn't
just fall on the womb, you know, with the force.
(32:25):
He had to work at it, and Yoda made him
look a fool over there in Dagoba. Yeah, he lost
a hand, he did made him a lot of the
characters in his hands really dark. Did they lost hands?
If you go through again my daughter's encyclopedia, you will see,
you know, so and so had their hand repaired. But well, yeah,
there's Luke, there's Vader. Yeah, um, some dude in the
(32:48):
bar and the first one Lungin. Maybe I don't know.
I think you just got run through that one. I'll
ask my daughter, Okay, get home, all right, Well there
you go. Story editing. I think this is a great
episode because it really lays out a very achievable way
to uh to to do something that might otherwise seem
(33:08):
like something out of science fiction, a way to change
our memories, to change the way that we interpret the past.
Um and uh and so I challenge, you know, anyone
who is is dealing with with some sort of problem
in their life to consider trying this out. You know,
don't see it as your only solution, but but give
it a go and see what what can be done. Yeah,
(33:29):
and if you again, you want to check out that
story prompt by James Penna Baker. Just google his name
and then perhaps writing and health some practical advice. All right,
let's call the robot over here and do a quick
bit of listener mail. All right, we have a quick
one from Alex. He says, Hello, Robert and Julie. I
hope your day is going well. I've been a listener
(33:49):
of stuff to ab All your Mind for about four months.
I loved your podcast so much I even went back
as far as two years ago and listen to your
allowing your podcast. H First off, let me thank you
for being so respectful when you talk about cultures and religions.
This personally means a lot to me. I am not
religious really, but I am very aware and sensitive when
talking about religion or culture. Also have a topic for you.
Guys are sociopath slash psychopaths biologically and neurologically doomed. Is
(34:14):
there any hope for these unlucky people born this way?
Is a sociopath psychopath the ultimate apex predator of our species.
I think this would be a really interesting study, to
say the least. And Uh. Alex goes on to say,
thanks for your time, keep doing what you do. Thank you,
Alex That is very interesting because we talked recently about
how Luis c. K has a bit in his stand
(34:36):
up about how we're really lucky that we got out
of the food chain. We are the apex predator. Now
we don't have to worry about it, but you know
one another, we're sort of a problem. We know that
we tend to main and kill each other. And then
there's this idea psychologically, is someone who's a sociopath who
has no community ties, a lack of empathy a predator
(34:58):
in a sense. Yeah, that's it's certainly a topic we
could explore. I know they were for certain there were
at least a couple of really interesting studies to come
out on sociopaths uh in the in the past year
that that I'd looked podcast on at some point in
the future. Indeed, yes, and maybe that will show up
fairly soon. All right, So there you have it. If
(35:20):
you have anything you would like to add on this
topic on other topics, then you know where to find.
It's got to stuff to blow your mind dot com.
That's the mothership. That's where you find all the podcast episodes,
all the videos, all the blog posts, all the lists,
all the galleries, and links out to our various social
media sites, including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler and Julie. If
one wanted to get in touch with us UH in
(35:40):
a more old fashioned way, where would they find us? Ethan?
Send your narrative to us that blow the mind at
discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of
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