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Memory Studies: A Thousand Foot Overview

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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