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1:02

You know, Ian, whenever someone asks me to

1:04

get in their B-Real, I'm always

1:07

like, what? What is that? What's happening? What are we

1:09

doing? Why are we doing

1:11

this? Do we need to do this? I'm not very

1:13

social media savvy, so they have to give me a

1:15

break. You're talking about the app, right? This

1:18

app that asks people to post a photo

1:21

from both the front and rear cameras on their phone

1:23

and get a coordinated message in your friend group to

1:27

take your B-Real photos, right? Yes, and I've heard

1:29

that everyone on the app takes a photo at

1:31

the same moment in time. At the same time.

1:33

Yeah, that's how I understand it. I'm

1:35

curious if that's across time zones. I don't know. Very

1:37

interesting. Yeah, I think it is. I

1:39

think it's synchronized. Synchronized photos of everything

1:42

around you, and then they vanish again. Normally,

1:44

we're sitting on my couch or eating

1:47

lunch, like something super mundane. Yeah, I

1:49

think that's part of the idea, is to show

1:52

that most of the time, your life is ordinary. Right.

1:56

Welcome to How to Keep Time. I'm Becca

1:58

Rashid, co-host of the B-Real. and producer of

2:00

the show. And I'm Ian Bogus, co-host

2:03

and contributing writer at The Atlantic. Becca,

2:06

do you remember Time Capsule? Yes, I

2:09

didn't really live in that era, but yes,

2:11

I've heard of that. Okay, that's what I

2:13

was wondering. It used to be kind of

2:15

a thing. You would collect a bunch of

2:18

photos and scraps of paper and letters and

2:20

whatever you could find and bury it in

2:22

the yard for folks 100 years

2:24

later to dig up and investigate. Right.

2:26

We used to assemble these archives, these

2:30

time capsules for the distant future, and

2:32

some of them are like cosmic. In 1977, America sent human memories,

2:37

almost time capsule-like memories, into deep

2:40

space on Voyager, and now

2:42

they're out there in the galaxy somewhere. Right. But

2:45

as a kid in the 80s, it felt

2:47

like time capsules were everywhere.

2:50

You'd trip over people burying time

2:52

capsules in their schoolyards or churchyards.

2:54

Yeah. I remember I went

2:56

to visit the site of Oppenheimer's

2:58

atomic bomb test. As a kid, they

3:00

were putting a time capsule in

3:02

the ground. There was everywhere. Wow. And you know

3:04

the stuff that goes into it. It's

3:07

a different time horizon than your camera roll.

3:09

You yourself don't have access

3:12

to the records of your own life you're trying

3:14

to save for someone else. Yeah, it's not for

3:16

you. It's for some future generation

3:18

to see the ordinariness of your

3:20

present life. Right. That's quite a

3:22

bit different than taking smartphone

3:25

photos that you'll probably never look

3:27

at again, or posting

3:29

ones on Bireal that will then disappear

3:31

a day later. Right. So it does

3:34

seem like apps these days, they really

3:36

orient us toward the present, and

3:39

less so toward the past and the

3:41

future. Interesting you say that. I feel like I

3:44

wonder if it really orients us

3:47

towards the present, or if just a lot

3:49

more of our present time is now used

3:51

to document things we want

3:53

to look back on in

3:55

the future. Interesting. Yeah. And

3:58

how are we even distinguishing? pushing between

4:01

present, past, and future time

4:03

anymore. Don't all

4:06

those B-Real photos that you take begin

4:08

to blur together and just become this

4:12

unmanageable sort of trove of content?

4:14

I get the kind of longer

4:16

term projects that people do,

4:18

like parents taking photos of children every day

4:20

as they grow up to document their change

4:22

over time. But all

4:25

the stuff in between just feels like a

4:28

culture around needing to capture

4:30

our time in some way, to measure it,

4:32

and just kind of make sense of the

4:35

movement of time in our lives. Yeah.

4:39

I mean, there are so many apps these days to

4:41

record and measure just

4:43

about everything. The

4:46

number of steps you took or stairs

4:48

you climbed, your

4:50

weekly screen time report,

4:52

the UPS packages you

4:54

received, period tracker apps

4:56

that measure women's bodily rhythms,

4:58

how much exercise you did yesterday or

5:00

didn't do, all of that

5:02

stuff. It used to be weird to record stuff

5:05

like that. Justin Holl, Harold is

5:07

one of the first bloggers when he started

5:09

publishing his personal diary on a website in

5:11

1994. It was strange. He

5:13

was posting personal things and people thought that

5:16

was unusual and they were maybe even uncomfortable

5:18

with it. Or an

5:20

early internet entrepreneur named Josh

5:22

Harris famously streamed his

5:24

whole life, him and his girlfriend in 2000

5:28

right after the turn of the century. And that

5:30

was weird too. It was strange and

5:33

it felt like dirty in a way you were

5:35

seeing into someone else's life. And it was

5:37

also weird when the so-called Quantified Self movement

5:40

arose a few years after that. What exactly

5:42

was that? Right. So that was

5:44

a name at the time for this, like a new movement driven

5:48

by technologists largely to

5:50

record and track anything that you could record and

5:52

track, the step counting and all that kind of

5:54

stuff started then too. And

5:56

so all of that had To be

5:58

invented. And it is. The only com

6:00

to feel natural because it's been adopted, which

6:03

is notable that so many people like okay

6:05

yeah, will do that. Interesting. And and

6:07

that's clearly just a huge cultural

6:09

shift right about what feels too

6:11

personal to share? Or even

6:13

too personal to keep rights. Like

6:16

I'm thinking about my My First

6:18

blog as like a middle schooler

6:20

on tumbler. I had tumbler essentially

6:22

just embarrassing garbage on there that

6:24

I didn't have to worry about

6:26

anyone seeing. It was really just

6:29

a documentation of my favorite music

6:31

certain trends, but now a lot

6:33

of. Online. Content I

6:35

see or or documentation in general feels

6:37

a lot more a curated and away.

6:40

You know back of my generation

6:42

people did whispered stuff or people

6:44

used to keep you know diaries

6:46

race but that was the analysts

6:49

filtered. partly because it was so.

6:51

Private. Private same

6:53

people kept off for nobody.

6:55

kind of does for themselves

6:58

but then slowly over decades.

7:00

We've. Removed that activity on mine. Mm not

7:03

only made it normal to share, it. But.

7:05

Also, normal to try to hold on to all

7:07

that stuff to document. keep it in a different

7:09

way and it's not. Everyone would have a diary

7:11

back in the day and now can everyone does,

7:14

even if they don't call it that. I've

7:16

always wondered if this sort of

7:18

compulsive documentation in the habits we

7:20

have around writing down what happens

7:23

at any moment in time is

7:25

actually about the seer of losing

7:27

time and and nerve impulses you

7:29

know want to control it. I.

7:32

Felt this kind of. Maybe

7:34

pathological anxiety? that. If

7:37

I lost those memories, I lost the

7:40

memory of. The. Emotional.

7:42

Whether of the day I

7:44

would be losing some essential

7:47

part of myself, the central

7:49

part of my life. So.

7:52

In Serum and the says. Kept

7:54

a diary since he was about

7:56

fourteen, documenting her daily life detail

7:58

by detail I read. My bed

8:00

on my laptop I read on

8:02

the sofa. I was unable to

8:05

stop ruminating on the smallest things

8:07

that happened to me while I

8:09

wrote them down at was points.

8:11

I. Could then be free of this kind

8:14

of obsessive like you know, thinking and

8:16

rethinking. Answer is also the

8:18

author of many nonfiction books and

8:20

she's a professor of creative Writing

8:22

at Antioch University. Her practice of

8:24

writing everything down and this diary

8:26

made me wonder how our all

8:28

the ways that we play with

8:31

time and do the ways that

8:33

we try to preserve it by

8:35

documenting how much is that really

8:37

helping us hold on and. I

8:40

know we we want to keep time else

8:42

can we. Can

8:46

you describe the style of a typical

8:48

entry in your diary? In the

8:50

beginning. The very beginning when I was in my

8:52

teens. The. Entries were very

8:54

emotionally overwrought. Me: I'm really was

8:57

just sort of your like you

8:59

know toxic waste dump as teenage

9:02

feelings? Was I saying something? I

9:04

was a fairly universal experience for

9:06

teenage direst. Yeah, I'm over

9:09

the years I I began writing

9:11

and present tense I stopped using

9:13

the pronoun i I in law

9:15

that states the your month and

9:17

day on so there are you

9:20

know there are some for a

9:22

mole habits that have become somewhat

9:24

sexed over the years. You. Know

9:26

A lot of Styris are people

9:29

who journal to the extent that

9:31

you do or sought out later

9:33

in life and later and history

9:35

for their reflections on a specific

9:37

moment in history or a moment

9:40

in time of know nobody. Would

9:42

care like really, there's there's no

9:44

historical moment captured. Of my diary. My

9:46

heart sinks when I. Think. Of

9:48

the prospect of having to like represent the past

9:50

where the people of the theater because like now

9:52

it's just going. Be. Like here's what I

9:55

was thinking about and this person

9:57

I was obsessed with. Yes,

10:00

It's all going to be really embarrassing if we're

10:02

looking for historical import. Can

10:10

you explain a bit about how

10:12

this process of recording every day

10:15

changed when you became a

10:17

mom or perhaps when you were pregnant with your

10:19

son? Yes. Soon after

10:21

my son was born, I

10:25

underwent a period of sleep

10:28

loss. Because your

10:30

working memory is so impaired

10:32

by sleep loss, I

10:34

lost the sense of linear time

10:36

in the way that it had

10:38

felt before. Once I

10:40

had the ability to think about

10:42

abstractions again, to think about anything

10:44

except keep the kid alive, keep

10:47

the self alive, I realized I don't

10:49

need the diary. It's

10:51

neither necessary nor sufficient. So

10:59

Ian, in our pursuit of keeping

11:01

time and trying to figure that

11:03

out, I wonder how

11:06

these gaps impact our memories. Like

11:08

with Sarah, she wasn't able to

11:10

document every single thing she had

11:12

planned to. When her son

11:14

was young, she had to step away from her diary.

11:16

And I think there are sometimes

11:19

these gaps between the way

11:21

we record things and how we want to

11:23

remember them. We might just

11:26

snap a photo at lunch with friends,

11:28

but we really want to remember how

11:30

deep the conversation was during the meal.

11:33

And I wonder if there's some shorthand

11:35

way to practice making those kinds

11:37

of memories stick. Yeah,

11:40

totally, Becca. I mean, the memories we keep are

11:42

related to the way that we hold

11:44

on to them. If we want to learn how to

11:46

keep time, we need to know

11:48

something about how memory works so that we

11:50

can use it effectively. We

11:53

are not designed to remember

11:55

everything. Our memory is supposed to

11:57

be selective, right? So we all

12:00

often kick ourselves for not being able

12:02

to remember everything that we ever experienced.

12:04

But I think that expectation is wrong.

12:07

I talked to Charan Ranganath, a

12:09

professor of psychology and neuroscience at

12:11

the University of California, Davis. And

12:14

Charan taught me that memories are not

12:16

just records, like stored pages of a

12:18

diary, pictures on a phone or whatever.

12:21

But the way that we interact with our memories

12:23

also changes them and

12:25

us. And I

12:27

think we don't appreciate both

12:30

the opportunities that memory gives us

12:32

for the future and the way

12:34

it already does affect us without

12:36

even necessarily knowing it. How

12:38

do we hold on to memories in

12:41

our brains? So memories

12:43

themselves come about through

12:46

connections between neurons that change

12:48

when we experience something. Literally

12:51

there's a physical change that takes place

12:53

in our brains after

12:55

we have all of these experiences

12:57

and our brains are constantly reshaping

12:59

themselves over time. Now

13:02

some things that we experience are

13:04

more significant than others and they

13:07

release these chemicals called neuromodulators. So

13:10

it could be when we're under stress or it could

13:12

be when we're surprised or it could be when

13:15

we're experiencing desire or some other

13:17

kind of motivation. Those are

13:19

all things that release these chemicals and

13:21

those allow certain memories to persist

13:24

at those moments. And so by

13:26

default we will have

13:29

predominantly better memory for

13:31

these things that are more memorable essentially, the

13:33

things that we should remember, the things that

13:35

our brain biologically responds

13:38

to in a way because

13:40

it should be significant. Does that

13:42

make sense? Well it does but it makes me

13:44

want to ask what does it mean for something

13:46

to be more memorable? Yeah

13:49

so in terms of what

13:51

the brain is trying to

13:53

do is it's trying to

13:55

find something that is not

13:58

consistent with what we're doing. what we

14:00

would have already known before. That's

14:02

a big part of it, right? So in

14:05

other words, if you have constraints on how

14:07

much that you can remember, why

14:10

remember the things that are already consistent with

14:12

what you do? You just need to remember

14:14

the things that are different in some

14:16

way. So that distinctiveness is

14:18

a big part of what makes something memorable.

14:22

And then of course there's the other things

14:24

like the ways in which an experience grabs

14:26

onto some of our motivational systems in

14:28

the brain which also are associated with

14:30

emotions. So things that make us scared

14:33

or things that make us feel

14:35

like I said, desire or hunger. But

14:38

even curiosity too is another one that

14:40

we found drives these changes in the

14:42

brain. You

14:44

know, we often as individuals in the world, we

14:47

wanna like hold on to time.

14:49

We don't wanna let it go. We wanna

14:51

keep a kind of closeness with events that

14:54

happened to us, whether they're important or

14:56

whether they're kind of unimportant but delightful.

14:59

We wanna hold on to time almost. Is

15:01

there a strategy for that for like

15:04

going, oh okay, this thing is happening to

15:06

me or just happened. I wanna keep that

15:08

close to me. How

15:10

should I go about doing it? That's

15:13

something that I've been thinking a lot about is

15:16

how to not only remember but

15:19

to curate my memories, taking

15:22

advantage of the selectivity. And

15:25

so what I try to do

15:27

is focus on the things that I

15:29

want to remember and creating

15:31

experiences that are going to be more

15:33

memorable. So sometimes that involves a change

15:35

in our context just to put us

15:37

in a new state of mind and

15:40

give us something that's a little different than our

15:42

routine. So just to give you

15:44

an example of the opposite of that during the

15:47

pandemic, when we were all locked down,

15:50

everyone had lost that ability to change their

15:52

context. Right, we're all stuck at home. We

15:54

were all stuck in from screens all day.

15:57

And so I asked students

15:59

in my class. class, do you

16:01

feel like the days are passing by

16:03

faster, slower, or the same while you're

16:06

locked down? And about 95% of

16:09

the people in the class said that they

16:11

felt like the days were passing by more

16:14

slowly. So then I said,

16:16

do you feel like the weeks are passing

16:18

by faster or more slowly? And about 80%

16:21

of them said the weeks were actually

16:23

passing by faster. So

16:25

what I think it was is without that change

16:27

in context, people felt like their days were just

16:29

going on forever. But then when

16:32

you reflect on longer timescales, you say to

16:34

yourself, hey, what happened in

16:36

the past week that was memorable? And the fewer

16:38

things that you can pull up, the

16:40

more it feels like time was just passing

16:42

by and slipping through our fingers. Given

16:46

that most of us when we think about memory, we think

16:48

of it as being about the past, what

16:50

does it mean to construe memory

16:52

as an activity of

16:54

the present or the future instead? So

16:58

I've spent much of my career studying

17:00

what's called episodic memory, which is our

17:02

ability to remember events from the past.

17:05

But a lot of my recent

17:07

work has been really about

17:10

how we use information in

17:12

episodic memory. And so what

17:15

I mean by that is, let's say you're watching a

17:17

movie or you're listening to a story. How

17:19

do you use what we've learned

17:21

in memory to be able

17:23

to understand what's going on in those stories or

17:25

movies? How do we predict it? Or

17:28

if we're navigating, let's say you're trying to

17:30

figure out your way from the

17:33

hotel to this place where you have a

17:35

conference, how do you use

17:37

memory to actively figure out

17:39

where you are and navigate to where you want

17:41

to go? So in other

17:43

words, moving from this perspective of memories

17:45

being about the past to

17:47

memory being about the present and the future.

17:54

So Ian, if Charn is saying that we

17:56

do a better job at holding on to

17:58

memories When we're experiencing. The new

18:00

Or or novel for me as

18:03

with my I phone camera roll

18:05

is like a low stakes kind

18:07

of you know, here's a a

18:10

beautiful flower ice on my wall,

18:12

whatever and go and not not

18:14

at least consciously trying to preserve

18:17

a memory or hold. On to

18:19

it on officer I mean. but but also,

18:21

think about how much easier it's become Becca

18:23

to to do that with yeah of course

18:25

mean it's it's simply a habit you know,

18:27

and I mean that in a negative ways

18:29

to thing that we do. When.

18:31

And it's a thing that people didn't

18:33

used to do of my we are

18:35

we recorded things, but we didn't do

18:37

so obsessively because and terror. You.

18:40

Couldn't he was not possible, right?

18:42

Photographs were expensive and time consuming

18:44

to develop on film in a

18:46

grinding, our memories long and and

18:48

in diaries this is you know,

18:50

irritating and he give a hand

18:52

crap or whatever and I'm amazon

18:55

or triply. People are really. Reviewing.

18:58

How the change with time? Or

19:00

randomly a know they are they are or

19:02

are we just poured it or lose your

19:04

as. I mean, that's a good

19:07

point. I've seen interesting data

19:09

from the University of Illinois

19:11

on how people who looked

19:13

at themselves more often during

19:15

audio tiles then reported worse

19:17

moods. Zoom calls

19:19

and so maybe. We

19:21

simultaneously want a heightened

19:23

sense of awareness and.

19:25

Rejected. Yeah, you're being in your life

19:28

and recording your life. They they feel like

19:30

they're at odds. You have to move back

19:32

and forth between them and away. Totally yeah

19:34

I'm I'm really upset though the you brought

19:36

up the the seeing someone video. Say this

19:38

because I've really been noticing this lately. I

19:41

use a Zoom and Microsoft teams both

19:44

of the software packages for video calls.

19:46

The case and Zoom has this filter

19:48

that like smooths out your son's one

19:50

and it makes me look Traits? Are

19:52

you sure that's true in my district

19:54

A? I didn't realize it until I

19:56

started using teams which doesn't have under

19:59

the banner ahead. Then I prefer to

20:01

like ago ended to Microsoft teams and

20:03

I'm like oh my goodness or who

20:05

is this old guy looking at me.

20:08

I. Didn't know that that. Yeah. There's

20:10

a button I think it says enhance your

20:12

appearance or something. Oh wow. I thought that

20:14

says ah what I looked like. Great bow,

20:16

I'll I'll and I'll get and limits on hundred

20:19

my you look that way but I don't I

20:21

don't I have to have my parents and this.

20:23

Yeah I mean that's that's just like a

20:25

filter on worth calls on. Then I think

20:27

about all the other things on social media

20:29

that me to into a supermodel and all

20:32

these apps that show. You what? you'll look

20:34

like forty years into the future? Same passing.

20:36

totally. Said I've always stayed away from

20:38

those apps because I see like if

20:40

I saw myself, you know, sixty years

20:42

into the future I would feel like

20:44

a stranger to myself, rape, and then.

20:47

There's such interesting psychological research about

20:49

the barriers to connecting with that

20:52

future version of ourselves. Because many

20:54

of us, you know, our identities

20:56

change with time. We can't really

20:58

emotionally connected to the needs of

21:00

our future self. you know, which.

21:03

Makes us probably worse. Long term

21:05

planners and saving for your future

21:07

selves has loads. Saving money

21:09

for a stranger? You don't know that

21:11

person or know their needs and us.

21:13

but I mean you can read and.

21:16

Write. Radical, you know it's and be behavior.

21:18

Decide to speak like Economists. Whatever the sometimes presents

21:20

his problem you're describing as like a simple one

21:22

little sister or a problem of rise and

21:24

fall are plenty to save for the you to

21:27

discuss in will be a killer for your health

21:29

and go to the doctor. But

21:31

it's really hard. and it is actually. A

21:34

long standing. Up Muzzle in

21:36

Ins in Human Culture and our

21:39

conception of Salt of Philosophers have

21:41

a different name for this problem.

21:43

They call it identity over time

21:46

and it's just not obvious. With.

21:48

You or me or anything. is

21:51

the same thing that it once was

21:53

when it moves in into the consequence

21:55

of rain i guess what i'm saying

21:57

is it's not just a problem of

21:59

planning are being foolish kind of overcoming

22:01

our foolhardiness through habits, although it might

22:03

be that too. But like a real

22:05

legitimate philosophical question. Quandary

22:07

is at work here. Right,

22:09

and given your larger philosophical point

22:11

here, it does bring up a

22:13

question for me. Like, what

22:15

should I be holding onto and recording?

22:17

And is it even helpful in understanding

22:20

how I'm changing over time? Or

22:23

is all this record keeping via

22:25

social media and diary writing just

22:27

affirming some evidence that we exist?

22:35

I think it is possible that

22:37

social media might feel exactly the way

22:39

that my diary feels to me,

22:41

which is that until you post it,

22:43

it doesn't feel like it's done yet.

22:46

Or until you post something, you don't

22:48

exist. Or maybe until X number

22:50

of people see the post, it hasn't

22:52

really finished happening yet. Right. And for

22:55

me, obviously, the audience thing is

22:57

not the thing that scratches

22:59

my itch, but simply just the expression

23:01

of it in language is what makes

23:03

me feel better. Interesting.

23:06

When you read back over

23:08

your diary, does it feel like you're

23:11

reading your own words or like you're

23:13

looking into someone else's life? Oh,

23:17

wow. That's interesting. Well,

23:19

if I go far back enough,

23:21

occasionally I want to see

23:25

if something happened the way that I remember. And

23:27

so I'll go back enough

23:30

years that I don't remember

23:33

what it was like to write that

23:35

year. And it doesn't

23:37

feel like somebody else's life, you know, it

23:39

just feels, I don't know how old you

23:41

are, but it just feels like, oh,

23:43

yeah, this was one of my previous

23:46

iterations. This is, you know, me,

23:48

like 2.9, now I'm, you know,

23:50

9.4. Wi-Fi

24:00

or something, I'm just kind

24:02

of scrolling back in my camera roll for hours.

24:05

And it doesn't provoke any kind

24:08

of intense emotion or

24:10

kind of nostalgia of like,

24:12

oh, wow, this amazing

24:14

trip I took three years ago. It's just kind of a

24:16

photo in my phone, almost the same

24:18

way I would access a memory in my mind and just

24:20

like pull it up. Yeah, it

24:22

definitely feels like the tools for

24:25

that kind of revisitation of

24:27

memory are like really underdeveloped.

24:29

Like sometimes I get a

24:31

push notification from Facebook. I really don't use Facebook,

24:33

but it's still on my phone, I guess. And

24:36

it says like, you have memories to look back on

24:38

today. Oh, yeah. You know, like,

24:40

what? Okay. Yeah. My adult

24:42

kids were in town for the holidays. And at one

24:44

point, Facebook sent a push that said, you have memories

24:47

to look back on and showed

24:49

me a picture of my son. And I was like, Facebook,

24:51

he's in the literal house right now.

24:53

Like, is it back off, you know? Come

24:55

on. Like, I'm doing it.

24:58

I'm doing the thing. Yeah. So,

25:00

but then if, you know, if it knew where he was, then that

25:02

would be creepy. So, you know, who knows what to do. I

25:05

mean, technology has definitely helped

25:07

us keep more time through memories, but

25:09

it's also done it in

25:11

a haphazard way that maybe doesn't have

25:13

the highest quality result. I

25:16

think Charon's advice about being selective

25:18

about which memories we keep is so

25:20

tough in this era when all

25:23

the memories in our

25:25

mind also have some kind of memory. Some

25:27

kind of physical record online to actually pull

25:29

us, you know, back into that moment. Right.

25:32

It's all munged together for sure. It's like, you

25:34

know, maybe somewhere in your house you have like

25:36

a shoebox of print photos, you

25:39

know, somewhere and you threw them all in.

25:41

But now it's like everything that you've ever

25:43

thought or seen or done is in one

25:45

giant shoebox in your phone. It's hard to

25:47

know how to make sense of any of

25:49

it. How

25:52

do you know when you're doing the right thing? When

25:54

you're keeping the right amount, when you've overdone it or

25:56

when you've underdone it from the perspective of a kind

25:58

of healthy memory. Yeah,

26:00

I guess what I would say the

26:03

So: they're People Francis who have highly

26:05

superior autobiographical memory. They're not necessarily happier

26:07

than people who don't. They have these

26:10

detailed recollections of you know, what they

26:12

eat for lunch rite Aid nine months

26:14

ago, but they don't benefit from the

26:17

right. I think this is a very

26:19

good, quite a sense of where you

26:21

have to ask yourself what's useful. Yeah,

26:24

First of all, I think you're documenting

26:26

too much if there's things that you

26:28

document that you don't. Go back to

26:30

interesting. Right there you realize that your hoarding

26:33

memories I am a you don't want to

26:35

be a hoarder. As so

26:37

like that's your first syndicator. If I

26:39

took one hundred photos of my trip

26:41

in a never went back to them,

26:43

tell he took too many first of

26:45

assists. Ah, now sometimes you don't know

26:48

what's interesting until you look back. But

26:50

I think the problem is is that

26:52

if you take too many photos I

26:54

can guarantee you you'll never look back.

26:56

Costs: So what seat? Where's the impulse

26:58

com. Took. To horrid memories are

27:00

like that. to hold on to everything to

27:03

create you know, a bunch of records or

27:05

to keep up on to scraps or take

27:07

went to photographs? Is it about feeling like

27:10

where they desire to be in control of

27:12

time? And. It's passage. Yeah.

27:15

Absolutely, I think we're all

27:17

afraid of the idea that

27:19

we will lose our memories,

27:21

cause so embedded in our

27:23

narratives of who we. Yeah,

27:26

and so there's a existential fear there.

27:28

But also, I'm mindful of the fact

27:30

that I'm in the Fourth Quarter of

27:33

life is. So I'm asking myself, what

27:35

am I doing with my time right

27:37

now And if I look back and

27:39

I say boy, have spent the last

27:42

week just sitting in front of the

27:44

screen and I have nothing memorable from

27:46

those experiences. That's. Very

27:48

frightening to me that because I'd like

27:50

to have lived a life that's more

27:53

memorable than that's to. Sometimes it's not

27:55

about. hoarding every moment as

27:57

much as being able to valley you

27:59

the experiences you've had. Because if you

28:02

have, you know, one experience

28:04

that is valuable that you can draw

28:06

upon later on from the past week,

28:09

that's a whole lot better than mindlessly

28:11

documenting everything you've ever done for the

28:13

last week. Right. And

28:15

that's going to be more personally meaningful

28:17

to you, I think in terms of

28:19

anchoring you in where

28:22

you're going in your journey in life. Girl,

28:26

real talk. This whole it's

28:28

a new year, time to reinvent myself trash

28:30

is not the vibe for 2024. You

28:33

can find someone who loves you for you as you

28:36

are. You don't need to read

28:38

a stack of self-help books, only eat bad

28:40

salads or like start meditating

28:42

at 5am to be ready for

28:44

dating. So yeah, my advice is to

28:46

download Bumble and find someone who embraces

28:49

you the way you are right now.

28:51

Let me know how it goes. You

28:55

know, Becca, my mother always kept

28:58

everything, scrapbooks of stuff, you know,

29:00

like participation ribbons I got from

29:03

the third grade busking competition, whatever

29:05

it was, I don't know. I don't even know, you know, do you feel like you're

29:07

as connected to those items as

29:10

she is, like the scene, you know,

29:13

the third grade soccer trophy or whatever

29:15

make you nostalgic for that time? Absolutely not. And

29:18

I've always had this kind of weird feeling about

29:20

all that scrapbook stuff. And,

29:23

you know, like, are those things important? Am

29:26

I making a mistake? It actually makes

29:28

me think of it. There was this article

29:30

I commissioned for the Atlantic a number of years ago. They

29:32

made the case for why you should go ahead and

29:34

throw your children's like art away, like all

29:36

the, all the drawings and whatever the kids make. Yeah.

29:40

Cause, you know, if you have kids, I mean, they produce

29:43

all this art all the time. And it all feels very tender. And

29:46

important in the moment, but then it piles up and

29:48

it's not very good anyway. No, it's children's art. And

29:51

so like, you know, what should you do with it? My

29:54

mom would be so upset to hear that she just found some. old

30:00

art of mine that I made in middle

30:03

school and like re-laminated it at Staples.

30:05

This is like material from 20 years

30:07

ago. And that's

30:09

like one poster from my childhood that

30:11

helps her, you know, remember who I

30:13

was as a 12-year-old. But if she had

30:15

an iPhone, God knows what she would do. Yeah.

30:18

Yeah. I totally get it. I mean, Mary

30:21

Townsend, who's the philosopher who wrote this Throw

30:23

Your Kids Art piece I mentioned, like

30:26

what she recommended is we'll keep a few,

30:28

you know, be selective, keep

30:30

a few because saving something that

30:33

you'll never look at again, kind

30:35

of in the way that Tron is explaining, if

30:38

you keep all of it, that that actually will

30:40

erode those memories more than it will amplify them.

30:43

I wonder if part of the ease and

30:45

kind of joy of digital memories is that

30:47

they are kind of immaterial and they don't

30:49

have to take up physical space in your

30:52

house. No, for sure. I wonder

30:54

if they play less of a role in our

30:56

memory for those same reasons.

31:00

I don't know what that poster my mom

31:02

kept looking at it, holding it. I not

31:04

only have the memory of that

31:06

thing I made, but who I

31:08

was at the time, I can kind

31:11

of remember like painting on that poster,

31:13

why I chose the colors I did. And just

31:15

the general context of my life

31:17

in that period of time is stored

31:20

better in a way in that physical

31:22

copy. I mean, it

31:24

makes sense. But then at the

31:27

same time, now that your smartphone is such

31:30

a major part of your life and the extension of

31:32

yourself, really, when you create those

31:34

memories, you may be creating them in concert

31:36

with that device. And so

31:38

that could make the digital things seem just

31:41

as real, if not more real and striking than

31:43

the physical ones in the way you're just describing. Do you

31:46

think it preserves the

31:48

context of when you kind of captured

31:50

that memory in the same way? That's

31:53

it. I think that it does. I think that it

31:55

does. We

31:58

should be careful not to think of... of these

32:00

digitally created contexts is somehow

32:02

lesser than taking a,

32:05

what, like a film photo or, you know,

32:07

jotting something down on paper. Those

32:09

were technologies too. And we had a

32:11

different and maybe similar relationship to the

32:13

apparatus as something that was taking part

32:15

in the construction of the memory then

32:17

too. So,

32:22

Taunton, I wonder if you can tell me, like,

32:24

how does the contextual nature of memory impact

32:27

our general experience of

32:30

the world? And I'm especially interested in our

32:33

experience of the passage of

32:35

time. Context is central,

32:37

and this is something that we've studied a

32:39

lot in my lab, is

32:41

the idea that context comes

32:43

in as part of the memory itself. And

32:46

so, I don't know if you've had this

32:48

experience of hearing a song on the radio

32:50

and just all of a sudden a memory

32:52

that you didn't think was there popped

32:55

into your head. Or times where,

32:57

for me, it's like if I traveled

32:59

to India, which I don't do

33:01

very frequently, but when I have, I

33:04

immediately get all of these memories

33:06

of seeing my relatives in India

33:08

that I wouldn't necessarily be able to

33:10

access when I'm here. The sights, the

33:12

smells, the sounds, are

33:15

really enough to drive those experiences

33:17

of remembering. And so, context is

33:19

super powerful, both in terms

33:22

of determining what we remember and

33:24

also determining the things that we can't access.

33:26

That's interesting. So, are you suggesting that, you know,

33:28

if I have a memory that I want

33:30

to hold onto or I want to amplify,

33:33

that kind of changing the context in

33:35

which I remember it is one tool

33:37

to do so? Absolutely,

33:40

and that doesn't just have to be a change

33:42

in place, but it can also be a

33:44

state of mind. You know, I

33:46

think our brains naturally want to generate predictions

33:49

about how things are supposed to be. And

33:52

what that means is it reduces the load of

33:54

what we have to learn and remember. And

33:57

If you want to have something, though, that's memorable

33:59

and decision-making, Think of, you have to do

34:01

the opposite. You have to ask yourself

34:03

what's different about this experience that I

34:05

can hold on to their and you

34:07

could take advantage of that to buy

34:09

documenting what's different. So when I go

34:12

on holidays I like to take pictures

34:14

of things that are very unusual that

34:16

will bring me back to the moment

34:18

and sometimes those are actual landmarks. but

34:20

they could be even things like moments

34:22

when we're out eating at a restaurant

34:24

or something and I it's catch my

34:26

daughter laughing while she's got a drink

34:28

in her hands or something. And

34:30

those kinds of. Moments. Or

34:32

anchors that allow me to go

34:35

back and not just see the

34:37

picture but reeks variants the event

34:39

humans have had technologies of documentation.

34:42

For. Up for a long time or

34:44

whether those are photographs or or paintings

34:46

or i'm paper records books. How have

34:49

those changes in the way that we

34:51

do record keeping as a human culture?

34:53

What impact of a hat on our

34:55

relationship with with time in in our

34:57

or or Ico sort of cock and

34:59

Everly some supper time. I

35:02

can't give a precise scientific answer

35:04

to that question, but what I

35:06

can say is based on what

35:08

we know that our memories are

35:10

intertwined with our social world, right?

35:12

And so a lot of the

35:14

documentation that you're talking about is

35:16

not just for the purpose of.

35:19

Recording. But communicating scene.

35:22

And that acts of communicating our

35:24

experiences actually changes how we remember.

35:27

There's great research showing that parents

35:29

for insisted engage with children about

35:31

memory and meaningfully talk to them

35:34

about their interpretation of their past.

35:36

Actually, children are much less likely

35:38

to a mental illness later about.

35:41

So this ability to engage with

35:43

our past actually informs or narratives

35:45

of her life, and they inform

35:47

our sense of who we are.

35:50

If. we take that into the

35:52

realm of time some more of

35:55

a rich life narrative weekend construct

35:57

the more we feel that time

35:59

was well spent. And I think

36:02

even the painful experiences in our

36:04

life, if we engage

36:06

in ways of documenting like

36:08

with art, for instance, or

36:10

with journaling, the more

36:13

we can engage with even those

36:15

painful memories and approach it from

36:17

a different perspective, not one of

36:20

staying stuck in the past, but rather

36:22

how can I take that past and use

36:25

it as a learning experience or as a

36:27

way of understanding the world

36:30

and essentially growing from

36:32

it. I think that will

36:34

give you not just a

36:36

sense that you had that time, but that

36:38

you used that time well. You

36:43

know, Ian, I think in making this podcast

36:46

with you, I've realized that

36:48

my time has never really been separate from

36:51

me and I viewed it as separate

36:53

from me for most

36:55

of my life. I mean, it

36:57

can feel like you're swimming in

37:00

time, right? Or maybe against

37:02

time. But I guess

37:04

it's more like without the current, you

37:06

just don't even exist. Right. And

37:09

now I'm at least trying to

37:12

move with the current in a different

37:14

way, I guess, without

37:16

constantly thinking about another

37:18

way I should have used my time

37:21

or what else I could have been

37:23

doing. And that has

37:25

brought me some sense of relief. Sure. I

37:28

also came into this podcast feeling just

37:31

abilities about time, like where

37:33

did it all go and how can

37:35

I tame it moving forward? And

37:38

I understood that memory and personal records

37:40

and stuff like that that seemed to

37:43

be related to time, you know, like

37:45

of course, of course they are. But both

37:48

Sarah and Tarn have helped me understand how

37:50

our drive to document

37:52

things, whether it's with diaries

37:54

or photos or just the memories in your head. Those

37:57

are like kind of symptoms of that.

38:00

desire to hold on to

38:02

our experience of time, you know, to keep time.

38:05

Right. And, you know, like I was

38:07

saying, I feel like I have a

38:10

complicated relationship with what exactly

38:12

to hold on to. I want to

38:14

collect as much of the emotional experience

38:16

as possible. And I

38:18

don't know if that's a reasonable expectation to

38:21

be able to hold on to the joy

38:23

of every moment exactly as it happened the

38:25

first time. But

38:27

I think the drive to keep everything,

38:29

you know, whether on social media or

38:31

in shoeboxes or camera rolls

38:34

or whatever, convinces us

38:36

that we can really

38:38

hold on to that moment exactly as

38:40

it happened. I keep coming back

38:42

to Tarenzis or the word hoarding to describe

38:44

this kind of behavior. Like it

38:46

really cuts to the chase, doesn't it? Yeah.

38:49

We live in this like, pics or it didn't

38:51

happen world now. Right. And it

38:53

makes me feel like the time I

38:55

spend on whatever I'm doing has been

38:57

turned into almost like an evidentiary process.

39:00

Like unless I can prove to you that I

39:02

really ate this meal or visited this place, like

39:05

I didn't I didn't really do it, which

39:07

is really like it's pretty perverse when you think about

39:09

it, you know. But those choices are

39:12

still up to you. Yeah. What

39:14

we do with all those images in the cloud. It's an emotional choice.

39:16

Right. Absolutely. And, you

39:18

know, we want to hold on to the

39:21

best memories and

39:23

get rid of all the bad times

39:25

in our minds and probably in our

39:28

camera rolls as well. So

39:30

just trying to keep everything and hold

39:32

on to all of it and just

39:34

sort of document incessantly won't stop

39:37

the current of time. Right. Yeah.

39:40

I mean, Becca, we have all these tools that

39:42

are almost making memories for us before we're ready.

39:45

And we're forgetting that the selectivity of memory

39:47

is what we still have agency over. Now

39:50

you can choose what to hold on to. You

39:53

can choose. Yeah. I'm

40:00

Becca Rashid. And I'm Ian Bogus. Thanks

40:03

for joining us this season. Our

40:05

editors are Claudina Bade and Jocelyn Frank.

40:08

Fact check by Enna Alvarado. Our

40:10

engineer is Rob Smersiak. Rob also composed

40:12

some of our music. The

40:15

executive producer of audio is Claudina

40:17

Bade, and the managing editor of

40:19

audio is Andrea Valdez. If

40:21

you like what you heard this season, please

40:23

share this podcast with a friend, post a

40:25

link on social media, or leave a review.

40:28

It really helps. How to will

40:30

be back with a new season later this year.