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a poem by Natasha Trethewey

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a drawing by Remedios Varo

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V. Orlando: Memory is the Seamstress (2018)

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V. Orlando: Memory is the Seamstress (2018)

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a musical composition by Max Richter with words from Orlando by Virginia Woolf

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Richter: V. Orlando: Memory Is The Seamstress

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Self-centered memories: The reminiscence bump and the self (2008)

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Self-centered memories: The reminiscence bump and the self (2008)

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The reminiscence bump is the tendency of older adults to have increased recollections of events that occurred during their adolescence and early adulthood. This happens because memory storage in autobiographical memory is not consistent through time but increases during times of changes in the self and life goals, such as the changes in identity that occur in adolescence.

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Ads Implant False Memories | Science Blogs | Wired (2011)

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Ads Implant False Memories | Science Blogs | Wired (2011)

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This blog post introduces a theory called "memory reconsolidation". According to this theory, each time we recall a memory, we also remake it. This means that our memories become less accurate the more often we remember them.

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My episodic memory stinks. All my birthday parties are a blur of cake and presents. I'm notorious within my family for confusing the events of my own childhood with those of my siblings. I'm like the anti-Proust.

And yet, I have this one cinematic memory from high-school. I'm sitting at a Friday night football game (which, somewhat mysteriously, has come to resemble the Texas set of Friday Night Lights), watching the North Hollywood Huskies lose yet another game. I'm up in the last row of the bleachers with a bunch of friends, laughing, gossiping, dishing on AP tests. You know, the usual banter of freaks and geeks. But here is the crucial detail: In my autobiographical memory, we are all drinking from those slender glass bottles of Coca-Cola (the vintage kind), enjoying our swigs of sugary caffeine. Although I can't remember much else about the night, I can vividly remember those sodas: the feel of the drink, the tang of the cola, the constant need to suppress burps.

It's an admittedly odd detail for an otherwise logo free scene, as if Coke had paid for product placement in my brain. What makes it even more puzzling is that I know it didn't happen, that there is no way we could have been drinking soda from glass bottles. Why not? Because the school banned glass containers. Unless I was willing to brazenly break the rules -- and I was way too nerdy for that -- I would have almost certainly been guzzling Coke from a big white styrofoam container, purchased for a dollar from the concession stand. It's a less romantic image, for sure.

So where did this sentimental scene starring soda come from? My guess is a Coca-Cola ad, one of those lavishly produced clips in which the entire town is at the big football game and everyone is clean cut, good looking and holding a tasty Coke product. (You can find these stirring clips on YouTube.) The soda maker has long focused on such ads, in which the marketing message is less about the virtues of the product (who cares if Coke tastes better than Pepsi?) and more about associating the drink with a set of intensely pleasurable memories.

A new study, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, helps explain both the success of this marketing strategy and my flawed nostalgia for Coke. It turns out that vivid commercials are incredibly good at tricking the hippocampus (a center of long-term memory in the brain) into believing that the scene we just watched on television actually happened. And it happened to us.

The experiment went like this: 100 undergraduates were introduced to a new popcorn product called "Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Fresh Microwave Popcorn." (No such product exists, but that's the point.) Then, the students were randomly assigned to various advertisement conditions. Some subjects viewed low-imagery text ads, which described the delicious taste of this new snack food. Others watched a high-imagery commercial, in which they watched all sorts of happy people enjoying this popcorn in their living room. After viewing the ads, the students were then assigned to one of two rooms. In one room, they were given an unrelated survey. In the other room, however, they were given a sample of this fictional new popcorn to taste. (A different Orville Redenbacher popcorn was actually used.)

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My episodic memory stinks. All my birthday parties are a blur of cake and presents. I'm notorious within my family for confusing the events of my own childhood with those of my siblings. I'm like the anti-Proust. And yet, I have this one cinematic memory from high-school.

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a song by Talking Heads