This is a big topic that I feel merits two separate posts for now. I
might even revisit this topic again in the future. For now, the first part will
cover a very, very high level discussion on memory studies, and the next blog
post will cover why these memory studies are critical in thinking through
marketing strategies.
(Before jumping in, I’d like to share that a lot of this material came
from Dr. Anthony Le Donne’s book, Historical
Jesus: What Can We Know and How We Can Know It. While some of the material
is directed at Historical Jesus studies, his summaries on memory are absolutely
excellent and well worth reading.)
So I want to open this post by debunking a seemingly obvious myth and
our first big point: Memory is not an
objective input-output system.
To use an analogy, I frequently begin writing my blog posts in
Microsoft Word so that if I need to step away, I can save and come back to it
at a later point. When I re-open the saved document, everything shows up just
how I saved it in the first place.
That is NOT at all how memory works. Memory is largely colored by our
experiences and newly gained knowledge from other, possibly even wholly
unrelated things. If Microsoft Word documents reflected memory, you might open
a saved document to see that font has changed, certain words have been bolded
or underlined, content created or deleted, and far, far more. What we can know
for sure is that it will not look the same.
You can probably think of many instances in which the way you perceive
things change over time. Children do this all the time. One of the first
spherical objects a kid learns about is a ball, so it’s not atypical for a kid
to refer to everything as a ball. That child will learn over time that there
are differences between basketballs, soccer balls and golf balls. The kid will
also learn that other non-spherical shapes may also be referred to as balls,
like footballs. And other spherical things, like the sun, aren’t balls at all!
In the analogy above, you can also see how the mind likes to categorize
things and how that categorization evolved over time. Things started out as
balls and evolved into categories of sports balls, categories of spherical
shapes that aren’t sports balls, and categories of balls that you still play
sports with but aren’t spherical.
Which brings us to a second big point: Our minds classify and recognize things from already-established
categories, and those categories themselves can evolve over time. Aside
from just balls, our minds categorize everything. Food, animals, books,
abstract ideas, feelings, and yes, people.
Some folks have figured out that they can interestingly use this idea
of categorization and relational thinking into memorizing other obscure things
like the precise order of a 52 card deck or serial number. Check out the
YouTube video below:
I covered some huge ideas here, and I can think of a clean way to tie
up these ideas in a nice little knot. This single post doesn’t do them justice.
My next post will cover how these ideas in conjunction with my recently written
post on trust are important to the principles of marketing. Check back here in
a day or so for that!
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