An earlier version of this article was published in 2016.
Ask someone about the things he remembers best and most will have passed between 15 and 25. It does not matter if they are current affairs, sporting or public events: they can be Oscar winners, songs of the summer, books or personal memories. Those of us who are dedicated to researching memory call this 10-year period “the memory curve” in reference to the form it takes if we take into account a set of memories from a person’s entire life.
It’s one of those rare effects in cognitive psychology that is rarely investigated and we wonder why. Some neurobiologists propose that there is something in the way in which the brain matures that makes the information we process during this period register well.
Some researchers propose that we can better remember experiences that have to do with a first time such as the first kiss, the first driving lesson, etc. and most of these experiences tend to occur during those 10 years. Other researchers suggest that the fact that memories are focused on this period of time is somewhat definite culturally because it is when key things happen to us that are later relived and told.
Our research suggests something different: it may be because it is the period in which we process memories and information that will define us for the rest of our lives, or what is the same, the formation of our personality and we wanted to know if we were right. .
Unlike most previous studies, we did not want to rely on memory tests. The problem with memory tests for our theory it is that, by definition, what people remember is something meaningful on a personal level. It makes sense: people don’t remember random events and have trouble remembering or even paying attention to information that is not relevant. Since we are forced to care about the things that shape us, we end up remembering them.
You can avoid this by asking your research participants to recall events or songs to which they were not attached, but the problem is that whatever they remember is never entirely irrelevant. If something has stuck in your head because it is indifferent to you, it is something that still defines you. In our research we wanted to avoid this circularity.
What do we remember and in what way
Our method consisted in using another classic measure of the canon of memory research that has not been used much in this area: recognition. Rather than asking participants to recall things, we asked them to choose Oscar-winning actors or popular songs from a list from the 1950s to 2005.
Based on the responses, we were able to tell if they first remembered experiencing the movie or song or if they remembered how old they were when it came out and we found that they all focused on each other. 15 and 25 yearss.
We also asked participants to choose their five favorites from the list, something relevant in our study because it allowed us to know if the percentage of movies or songs that were indifferent to them between the ages of 15 and 25 was as high as the percentage of movies or songs in your favorites list. If those movies or songs not personally relevant also showed a similar data curve, our theory of personal development would be demystified and we would return to the idea that it is pure memory.
We realized that when it came to movies or songs that the participants didn’t care about, they didn’t remember them better if they were from the 15-25 years period than if they were from any other period in their lives. To be sure, in a second study we asked participants what they were your favorites and which ones remembered something: we got the same results again.
Our findings suggest that the reason people remember more about this critical period in their lives is, in effect, because it is when identities are formed. The things we live that are not relevant to our identity are simply forgotten and what defines us for the rest of our lives are our tastes and the events we attend, information and the media during this period of our lives.
This does not have to mean that memory theories related to the development of memory or cultural experience are irrelevant. There is still the question of why certain things matter to us on a personal level and those theories could have an answer: we can have shared views on what is beautiful or important on a cultural level; or we can depend on memory mechanisms to maintain our sense of who we are.
What we can say is that the personal meaning that something has for us is a key piece to understand why we remember more things from those 10 years of our lives.
Another avenue to explore are movies, songs, or other experiences that bring back memories but that we don’t like. We still have to investigate if these memories follow the same rule of 15 to 25 years even if they do not define us. For the moment at least we are One step closer to understand how this whole process works and the songs, movies, books or events from our younger years that we care about are surely partners for life and can even define who we are.
Image: Brandon Hoogenboom / Unsplash
This article was originally published on The Conversation. You can read the original article here.