Do You REALLY Remember

Alright, Greg, this episode is probably getting out a little late. We've been on track, but that was because I had a lot going on. I'm now moved across to the Midwest, but still in a temporary spot for now. All good. Getting back into the swing of things, and then we'll be back on track probably 100% here after the 4th of July.

But today, we are talking a little bit about memory and some of the things that affect it and kind of how to look at it, because we look at it a little bit differently. There are some great articles we discuss, as well as a little bit of a book. We talk about a lot in anything human behavior related because it's not as great as we think it is. We talk about memory being faulty, but it's kind of like that's almost the wrong way to look at it. There are reasons for it that we're going to get into a bit.

Exactly. One example I want to start off with was I was taking my wife out to dinner one time, and I was all excited. I was like, "Oh yeah, we're having a good time." I'm like, "Yeah, remember the last time we were here, and we ordered this, or blah, blah, blah? We talked to that one random person at the bar." And she's sitting there staring at me with a blank face. She's like, "What are you talking about? This is my first time ever at this restaurant." And I was like, "Oh, whoops."

Obviously, it was someone else — which she reminded me — someone else that I had taken there before I had met my wife, obviously. She hadn't actually been there. So, the thing was, to me, it felt like I short-circuited or something, right? Because I was so sure of that thing, but it apparently never happened. So the idea is, we'll get into explaining this and why this happened, why I sort of replaced her. I had this great memory. I want to associate her with good times, so I sort of replaced it.

We look at it as like, "Oh, memory's broken or fragmented," but it's not really like I was broken. It was just I was being a human being. And our memories don't play back like flawless recordings, right? They're like a rough draft. We rebuild every time we recall them. And so, recall is actually important; we'll get into that. But those little mistakes, I think it's better to describe them as features that are designed to help us learn, adapt, and make sense of an otherwise messy life.

So today, obviously, that's what we're going to be talking about and unpacking sort of why our memories slip, warp, and even lie to us, and how we can kind of turn those into powerful tools. Greg, I'll kind of let you go over the main topic here, main idea. You'll be referencing some article and another book, and I'll put some links in the episode details for folks who want to check that stuff out. The article's short, and then there's a newer book coming out that a couple of psychologists wrote that are great. This is all just kind of ways people describe it, but get into why this happens and what it's used for, why it happens, but how it can be useful and things to sort of take away from this episode. I'll let you kind of kick it off here.

No, I appreciate it. So, first of all, for all of our listeners in the Midwest, we're sorry because while San Diego County has lost a homeless person, you have gained one. And that's Brian's van that's backed up to the Walmart to get the free Wi-Fi, and he's digging in the dumpster at McDonald's. But welcome him.

So, Brian and I have an unconventional way of discussing topics. And what happens is we'll get on something, and we'll discuss it from two different standpoints: a very scientific, logical standpoint, and then, "Okay, so how is this useful to the rest of the world?"

So what I was doing is I was deep into this thing about phantom limbs and the memory created by a phantom limb, a legless veteran or a veteran without an arm. And is it the same if you were born without an arm? And amazingly, it is. So, countless studies are out there. Look, do your research. I've just been around longer than you. That's why I have recall on some of this stuff. Huh, what a topic!

But the idea behind the phantom limbs and memory got me onto dreams and memory. And a lot of stuff has been written out there and goes back to a couple of old white-bearded guys from 150 years ago. That's no longer valid because we've learned so much about the brain. So if we know about phantom limbs, phantom limbs would be a hardwired in the brain that's designed so you can feel and anticipate pain in your limbs so you can withdraw them before something serious happens—a bee sting, for example, that's almost autonomic, or a heat on the stove. If we understand that that's a planned, regimental way of doing things, very deliberate, then we understand that dreams are almost the opposite. Dreams are like a side effect of memory consolidation. Your brain has to replay and reinforce memories while you sleep. And then the hippocampus and neo-cortex are working together to say, "Hey, blend that with this one. That's a better memory."

Take. Yeah.

Do you see what I'm trying to say? So what happens, Brian, is that your memory was a memory that was fraught with wonderful, happy times, and the food was great, and the piano and stuff.

Yeah.

The booze and the heroin in the bathroom. But the idea is that your wife wasn't there. Okay? It was another significant other. But your brain thought there was no boundary between those because it was a good time. And you remember that good time that we had.

So the idea, and this is where The Human Behavior Podcast comes from, the idea is that we put so much credibility in eyewitnesses when the fact is your memory is flawed. And it's not flawed for the wrong reasons, it's flawed for the right. So I remember back to an old one, but a good one from Harvard: "Flaws of Normal Memory." So Brian will put the link on there. It's a great one to read. It's good stuff that you can talk about at on-duty roll call or to reinforce your written testimony or whatever. And then Sierra Green and Jillian Murphy wrote Memory Lane. And folks, when you see it, you'll love it immediately. And I'll tell you why, because it gave us the main idea for the podcast.

So you got dreams on one side of a bracket. You got phantom limbs on the other. And this is what they say right in their intro: "There's countless metaphors for memory. It's a leaky bucket, a steel trap, a file cabinet, words written in sand. But one of the most evocative and neuroscientifically descriptive invokes Lego bricks. A memory is like a Lego tower. It's built from the ground up, then broken down, put away in bins, and rebuilt in a slightly different way each time it's taken out." That's the amazing part, Brian. And that's because it's deliberately set up that way, not accidental.

I love that. The Lego metaphor, because we've all played with Legos or have kids that play with Legos. You can build something, you look at the picture on it, and then it gets packed away, and you build something else. But then you also lose some Lego pieces along the way. You know what I mean? It's not fully there, and then you don't have the right one. So, maybe it's not the right color, but it's the right piece, and it holds up the structure that you're building, but it's different than what it's technically supposed to be. But the point is, it still works.

I love the Lego one. I hadn't heard that one before because, like you said, I've heard all the other ones about memory, but that one's a really, really good way because it immediately shows that it's constructive, and it's constructed by little bits and pieces. It's categorizing. And humans do that for all kinds of different reasons, mostly for recall and speed. It doesn't want to... like we always talk about, it's why the theory of "close enough," right? It just has to be cognitively close enough. Your brain jams it in there. The small, minute things don't matter as much as what is the structure, what is the point, what is the actual thing you're building. "I don't care what gauge wire you put in there. I care: is this the building that's on the front of the box of the Lego thing?" That's almost one of the best ways to really look at it.

Yeah. And you know what? I put out, my Monday rants on LinkedIn, I put one out a couple of times ago and talked about that I really don't like when people talk about "go with your gut." This is one of the few times I advocate going with your gut because if you get into a situation and you're getting an overwhelming feeling—and I don't mean déjà vu, I mean the butterflies in the stomach and your some other things that are happening in your brain—what it is is you're matching up with a file folder for an emotional memory because emotion makes it sticky. And what you're doing is saying, "This may be significant." Whatever I'm involved in now, right, may be about breeding. It may be about me dying. It may be about a chance to eat or make a relationship with somebody that can behoove me in the future. And your brain becomes more efficient by jettisoning the stuff it doesn't need and acquiring the stuff it thinks it may need, not just for right now, but for future. And that's why we talk about the gift of time and distance because your memory works in that way to pay it forward, and you've got to allow that process to happen.

So, so let's jump into kind of like why, right? Why is our memory, why does our memory act like this? Because it would seem like, intuitively, kind of like, "Well, we always tie everything back to survival," because that's everything can get tied back to survival and emotion and everything, right? And you even brought up déjà vu that we could do a whole probably podcast on déjà vu and whatever the other one is. (Deja von is not what I was thinking of). But it would seem to me like if it's for survival, my brain should be really good at the details. It should be really good at remembering these very, very important things because if my survival depends on it, then it's got to be crystal clear. So, why isn't it? Why is it set up in this measure?

So, let's do that. Let's categorize. So, let's talk about three basic topics, right? Why we forget, why our memories are distorted, and why our memories are biased. And remember, these reasons, like Brian is saying, aren't failures unless they're caused by disease or injury. If you get kicked by a mule in the head or have Alzheimer's, that's different. You get what I'm trying to say? But these are intentional, adaptive features that allow us to learn and emotionally regulate our encounters and handle social settings.

So the first one of those: why we forget. Well, the simplest, lowest achievable level, the low-hanging fruit there, is we lack retrieval cues. We're not good at retrieval cues, and because it's temporal and transient, our brains don't remember things that are a long time ago as much as they do now. Now, there's no question that you lived through being a child. I'll give you an example. I had three generations of family members in last week. And the boy, while I'm talking to the boy, I go, "Do you remember your grandmother? You and your grandmother were there on Thanksgiving making bread and rolls and cookies, and the deer came up to the back window and were looking in, and we opened the door, and you were face to face with the mule deer in the yard." No memory of it whatsoever. And it was like, "Oh, wow." So, the retrieval there, the event is there somewhere. It may have been broken down in a couple of different things: "Oh, a mule deer later in life," right? But the idea is that the coding was maladaptive. So the code used at that time, he was a young boy, didn't know this was significant. And because there was no journal entry or a card or a photo that went with it, the retrieval is flawed. So, that's an important way to understand that your brain is going to audit and clear out those memories that you're not going back to very often.

Well, and it might be high school. For this boy, it was when he was six. That's a great point because, and you brought it up, it can be a maladaptive strategy. Sometimes people have that as a coping mechanism for something extremely traumatic where, instead of remembering the details, your brain goes, "Nope, we're going to block that out." And then that could obviously cause serious issues later, but you will not remember. Your brain says, "Don't worry about that. That wasn't a good thing, and you're it's too traumatic to deal with." And that can lead to then post-traumatic stress and different issues like that. But, you know, you brought that up: it gets encoded incorrectly. And so you can go back and, with the help of someone, kind of in a sense recode that and look at it as something as a learning point or something to build from. That's absolutely possible with your brain. It's extremely adaptive. But I thought that was a good example. And then, you know, you brought it, he obviously in his case, six years old, it was just like it didn't register as something valuable, right? Whereas your mom was probably like, "This is the coolest, oh my god, this is the greatest memory with my grandchild!"

So let's go there for just a second. One of the great things about the book that we quoted earlier and highly suggest you guys take a look at when it comes out is that they talk about fake news, the most recent fake news. Brian, sorry about that. Chugging the breakfast this morning. Must've got stuck in the craw. Steve McCray, by the way.

The idea is that when you take a look at there was a parade, there was the army's 250th birthday, and there was a "no kings" demonstration. Depending on where you are on the dial, there were 85 million "no kings" people and only seven people that came to the parade. Every soldier was forced into servitude to go to the parade and they didn't like it, or this was wonderful, look at us, and here's our photos. So what does that do to our memory? Well, just like that six-year-old Brian, when I showed him the countertop and the back door, and "you were here with Granny and doing it," I was storytelling. So I was creating a new memory based on the old memory that could supplant or support an old memory. But the fear is, does it create a new memory that never existed? See, so the good thing about your brain is, don't worry, your brain's been through this before. Your brain is much smarter than you are, and even though it's going on primitive cues, it's not fooled easily.

Well, that's my biggest argument against everyone talking about misinformation or disinformation or AI, and this—it could be influenced. I was like, "Are you just finding out that your brain and your memories can be influenced by external sources?" Because that's been going on as long as humans have been here. Whether it was gossip from a friend, a news article, something you heard, that's how humans are. Everything influences us. So, no, I'm not concerned about this one specifically because it's not going to be significant, and there's going to be another one 50 years from now.

So, why do you think that I get so pissed off when people come up with new terms for stuff? Officer-induced jeopardy. Gosh darn, what's the other one? The "something syndrome," the "Imposter Syndrome" and stuff. Look, at the very beginning, that one I think is a lot of people just doing a humble brag and trying to—

Yeah.

But what the problem with that is, Brian, is that if you go back to the very beginning of The Human Behavior Podcast, if you're still listening, thank you for enduring me. But at the very beginning of this podcast, when we were talking about the mind is a steel trap or its letters written in the sand. Okay? The reason there are so many descriptors on this topic of memory is because people have been talking about it since people have been talking. And that's huge. It's been around for a long time. People have been poking and prodding and testing it. And that's why it's so important for us to have a discussion because if you tell people your memory can be distorted—our next one, why our memory is distorted—if you tell them why we forget, then they can learn from that and reinforce by encoding correctly or creating mental triggers for certain events so they don't forget it.

I remember being in court one day, and a person said, "I read the Miranda rights off my card." And that's the thing they teach you at the academy. And a savvy defense attorney says, "Show me the card." And here's a kid sitting in full uniform, "Well, but my wallet, I don't..." and lost all credibility with the jury. You get what I'm saying? So, you're putting yourself out there sometimes from recall of an event that didn't occur or isn't strong enough.

So, let's go on to number two: Why does memory have distortions? Well, we don't go to the video. Brian said that earlier. We go to the vault where the videos are stored. But we have to take fragments from here and there, reconstruct them, deconstruct them, re-reconstruct them, and then use our beliefs and expectations and experiences to create what we think we remember. If we understand it, why do you write a written report? Not only does a defense attorney use it to impeach your testimony, but you write it so you can recall. Is your memory better today when you're testifying two years after, or when you wrote this report? Officer Brian, these are the things. Look, at the academy, we're flipping tires and shooting steel. Yeah, that's all good stuff, but these are the type of topics that people need to understand because they're going to hang with you your entire life.

You and I have both suffered from memory distortions. I got ADD like an MF'er. Add that to my PTSD and the fact that I got a shitty diet and don't sleep. And what happens is all of a sudden I'll go to Shelley and go, "Hey, I told you that this is important to me, and that we need to do it." And she's like, "I just came home. We've never had this conversation." Yeah. So, it's very similar to the one that you had, right? Where I set an expectation and create a memory for an event that's never occurred. So, how many times do we do that? And how many times is it autonomic to help us get through the day? And guess what? We do it all the time with driving, don't we? We're driving, and we remember the route to someplace, and we haven't been there in a good long time. Or when was the last time that you went back to your elementary school, and you go, "Wow, it's so small!" No, you got bigger, dude. But the idea is that the memory is close enough to the reality where it causes a distortion. So, I like distortions to think about those circus mirrors, you know, when you walk in, and they make your head look big or your body look... that's a lot of what's in that vault with your memories.

And, you know, part of this is just the amount of information we consume on a daily basis compared to, say, a long time ago when the only way you got anywhere was by walking. And you had your little area that you lived in with your family and your tribe and your... like, you only had so much information that you needed to recall and so much detail. And that's why certain people that live in certain areas are like, "Oh no, I know everything like the back of my hand," because they have, because they haven't left their competition. That's what I'm saying. And so, people are concerned with, again, like this comes with the information overload that we get. And I think your unconscious is extremely adaptive. It's called the adaptive unconscious, right? So, I mean, you can learn to do more. But what happens then, the granularity kind of goes away then, right? If you're on social media all day long, not everything is important. So, the more you consume, it's sort of like you're lowering the threshold for what your brain thinks is important. If you only go in there once and read one article and that's all you do today, then that's significant to you. But if it's compared against 300, well, your brain's got to prioritize it. So, it's like, do you want to read something on 300 different things today, or do you want to stick to one and get really good at that? And that's why people say, "Hey, focus on one thing," or "just get in this one area and then learn that and then move on." So, part of that distortion comes just from the amount of information from different areas that you get in.

Yeah, and add to that, Brian, that the sharp edge of the other side of that is lack of experience. When you don't have a tremendous amount of experience, you're learning. And when you're learning, the way you educate is very different than when you're a savvy person that's encountered these things before. And that's why, I know you've had this experience, so I'll give it to you this way: Do you remember the first time you taught somebody to shoot? If you took them out with a .44 mag and said, "Okay, what I want you to do is this one we're going to do single action. So, I need you to pull the hammer back, make sure your finger's off the trigger, take a shot." Okay. The recoil and all those other things isn't going to seem anywhere near as if you had them with, you know, a Trailsman .22, and they're firing, and you say, "Now listen, this next one's going to kick like a mule. Be careful."

What happens is that preparation for this novel experience that they're about to do is so important to the encoding of the experience. So if we don't make a big thing about it, like I remember the very first time I saw a dead body as a kid and saw a dead body as an adult, it was very different because the way my dad did it. "Okay, I'm going to let you cry now, and you're going to cry for a few minutes. Then you can put that away because we don't have time for that right now, and you're going to grab hold, and you're going to help me move this stuff out of the way." Okay, my dad was very deliberate about that stuff. So, if you set up and encode your memories that way, you can avoid future distortions, but again, temporally, the longer it goes from that event without photos and without rehearsal and without stories, Brian, you're going to forget significant parts of it. Only survival-based memories are the ones that stick around longer because they're hardwired. They're reinforced with hardwired.

And again, it's still, it's not they're not as granular as we think they are when you're recalling those. And that was the other thing too about why those distortions happen is because when you're recalling an event, you're actually not, you're not thinking back to the event when it happened. You're actually thinking about the last time you recalled it.

You visited.

So, if something's changed between the event and the last time you recalled it, like in now, that's how it becomes, you know, "Oh, the fish was this big," and then the next thing you know, it gets bigger and bigger. And that goes into some of the biases that we have too.

Well, let's talk about that then. Why do biases influence our memory? And generally—and Brian reinforces this all the time on The Human Behavior Podcast—generally, biases aren't bad things. Bias is a way of turning the event or the situation around in your mind and considering options, considering different points of view. But confirmation bias means that we'll remember information that confirms our beliefs, which means that we don't go outside of that very limited span of control. We don't hobberman and spin it around like the snow globe. What we do is we've already come to a conclusion, and that really limits us.

And I'll give you a perfect example of that. We know that domestic violence incidents are dangerous for police officers (coppers), but cops don't. Why? Because they forget that. Because every day they go on a noise complaint, a neighbor trouble, and a hundred domestic violence complaints that aren't dangerous. It's the "She said, 'You go home, I tell you what, if I come back and...'" Guess what? Those make us dumber, Brian, because they fill us up. And then all of a sudden, it's "What was that sound? Holy sh*t! This guy wants to kill the whole family!" Do you know that this guy is still on the run that killed his three kids when they were supposed to do the parental exchange? And the idea is that those seem like so separated by time, but it's the most dangerous thing you're going to encounter. So, it should be in the forefront of your mind to make you safer. Here's another on-duty roll call: Why are we dumber? Because guess what? There's a lot of fudge that gets in the way of those memories, right? And so, now we go, "Here's just another gosh darn domestic," right?

Well, and we, especially when it comes to memories and biases, like you know, like we talk about, all humans have a very egocentric viewpoint. So when I look back to that, it's I need to sort of see myself as the hero or see myself in a positive light. I don't like looking at it and going, "Ah, I could have done this better. Maybe this happened." So, you kind of have that, you know, it's like the joke, "Nothing ruins a good war story like another witness," right? When someone else comes like, "Wait a minute, there weren't that many people there. What are you talking about?" You know? And so, but we have to kind of see it in that light, you know? It's a sort of a self-preservation, egocentric view that humans have. And so, we're more willing to kind of say, "Oh, we did all these things great, and everything else is messed up."

But that's essential. Confirmation bias is a bias because it's also essential. For example, if you didn't have a modicum of confirmation bias, then you couldn't read a book and be immersed in the story because you wouldn't understand that that could be you. "Boy, these things could happen to me." That's why reading a horror story is much better than watching a horror film. And by the way, 28 Years Later comes out Thursday. I'm gone. You know me, I love my zomb. But Brian, when I read a Stephen King, let's say, I have to be able to look and become part of the story. Even if it's science fiction, even if it's futuristic, something I'll never encounter with the little green men, I have to see myself there. And the confirmation bias allows me to do that. I'm so egocentric. What can I learn from this event? What is happening in this story that might happen to me one day? And your brain in the background is going, "Go on. Go on. We're doing the Peter Griffin, 'No, Lois, I didn't look.' You know, I kept my finger on the page just in case." Those are the reasons that we have distortions. But also, they're deliberately intended. So, our brain learns from previous experience. If not, everything would be nuanced, Brian. Everything would be novel, and that's no good. That's, you know, the Groundhog Day is much better than going into a situation and being that idiot played in that Adam Sandler movie, "Hi, I'm John." Yeah, I know, John. You know, the guy that keeps coming back and repeating the same line all the time because he forgets everything. So, biases aren't generally bad, but you have to understand that the more confirmed you are in a bias, the less it's going to allow you wiggle room to consider other options. And that's why we end up saying, "Hey, screw this guy. He's going to jail. Hey, I'll tell you what. Next time I come back, you're going to jail." Brian, those deliberate and definitive answers aren't negotiations. And there's certainly not the escalation. You get what I mean? So, if I want to learn how to do that, I have to go through my own story. Your buddy Chip Huth and Arbinger, they're really good on that because what they say is, "Hey, you can change your story."

And I love that. And you truly can, right? But you have to be cognizant of the fact that you have a story. It's—

Well, you even just brought up, even, you know, reading the book. So, let's say a book comes out, it's popular, and then they'll make a movie about it, right? And a lot of people who read that book and then go see the movie, they don't like the movie and they go because it's different than the movie that played out in their head, right? So, like you said, they're reading it like you're now engaged in that. You're part of the story. You're playing a role. You're kind of immersed in it. And so, when it's projected on screen by someone else's vision of it, well, that's not your vision of what happened. So, you're kind of like there's that disconnect. So, yeah, it's incongruent with what you expected to happen. And you're kind of like, "Yeah, I don't know if I like the movie version. It was terrible." It's like, well, so—

Imagine that, because you're going to get this, you're going to get this from your daughter. How to Train Your Dragon came out now, and it's live-action characters. It's identical to the previous one, but much less animation, but the same amount of CGI. So, there's an argument online about girls—

There's real dragons in it then if it's—

Well, there always has been real dragons. It's the kids that are fake. Fake Viking kids. There's no such thing. But the idea, you idiot, the idea is that they're arguing online on the forums because the girl's hair is different than it was in the animated version, and this girl that plays the actress doesn't look anything like her. Well, how many times have we heard that, Brian? Oh, in the Hawaiian flick that came out, or this flick, the space one with the donkey. And the idea is that's because we fight with the photograph that we have, the index card that we've put in our Rolodex for that memory. So the idea is your brain is going to win, and you can reinforce it by recoding correct. You can go back and correct a memory, and the best way to do that is science and logic and faith and reality and those type of things. And that's what's wrong with PTSD many times, Brian, is we're stuck in the distortion. "We should have done something different. We were unable to do this. We lost control in this moment." So again, great topic for on-duty roll call. Look, if you're a trainer and all you're doing is teaching how to top off a mag, that's great stuff, but you're not going far enough. This is the type of topic that you have to cover.

That's one of the things to help fight against this. Like you said, if you have to write it down after something happened, and you can even do that as... it's interesting, one of the things I saw where someone did kind of like an experiment where it was like, "You know, recall some event, just voice record it on your phone, right? Recall an event."

Yep.

"You know, it was something that happened when you were a kid or something like that, and just leave it. And then later in the week, do it again." You would literally just record you telling the same story, and then you can go back and be like, "Oh, wait a minute. These details were different, or this was more important this time." You literally impeach your own testimony.

So true.

And it's like, "Oh my gosh!" Like, and, you know, it's important to understand because this is just how humans are. And there's nothing wrong. The earlier you embrace it, the better you're going to be, right? Just knowing that you're never going off of perfect information. You're never recalling exactly what things need to be, but that's okay. You almost don't have to. What are the major parts in here that we need to focus on? What was, you know, it's like we said with the puzzle piece or the Lego: what's the photo on the front of the box that you're trying to reconstruct? Get it close enough.

And somebody will amazingly know exactly it's, "Hey, it's the Eiffel Tower. It's not two cats playing with a ball of yarn." And is that significant? Yeah. That makes you faster. That makes you more cunning, more ruthless. That gets you ahead of potential competition. And in some instances, depending on your job, competition might be danger. It might be somebody that's trying to kill you, not somebody that's trying to win a contract. And that's important.

So, and that leads us to what we're talking about here, can also be, people use the term selective. "Hey, you have selective memory." They'll use that on me all the time, by the way. But selective memory allows us to — not our brain — to clean up and broom negative social interactions. There are certain times that we said a joke, or we did something, or walked into a room, or had our fly down or whatever, male or female, and that went where we were embarrassed or we didn't get the girl or the boy or both. And those past events challenge our view of ourselves, our self-view, our image, our ego. And so selective memory allows us to skip over the ones that we don't want and avoid them. Now, our brain is saying, "Be cognizant of these because you effed it up last time." But we're saying, "Yeah, but we don't want to go there because it embarrassed me so much." So selective memory allows us to emotionally regulate, and you mentioned this earlier, by forgetting those traumatic experiences or reconstructing them in a better, less negative light.

So that's a positive cure for PTSD in many people is saying, "Take me through that incident, but this time, you're in charge. What would you have done differently? How can we reconstruct that?" And you've got to remember that your brain is trying to make us look... Why is scar tissue so much stronger than regular tissue? Because the reconstruction helps us heal and cope with it, but it also pays it forward. "Hey, remember how you got that? Remember how bad that hurt? Remember that tingling sensation?" Those type of things. Brian, listen. Why is, let's say you have a burn on your arm, or you got bit, or like me, I got poison ivy late in life. The reason that it's so sensitive to touch after that is to remind you it's there so it has time to heal. That's ingenious. What factory machine does that? You know, the earliest machines coming off the assembly line had a self-oiler. Do you understand how that changed the industry, Brian? Instead of the kid coming up with the mop, you know, the Egyptian, you know, logs with the pyramids and stone. So, the idea is that our brain is a wonderful, amazing tool. But selective memory is when we reach in to try to change things either accidentally or deliberately, and we have to be cognizant of the fact that when we do that, the outcomes change. Rarely if ever does anybody go in and go, "Oh, doom and gloom. Let's take that wonderful memory at a wedding and make it horrible." We don't do that. We do it opposite. "Oh my, if I wouldn't have been there to pick up that veil, think how the wedding would have..." Right? And those are constructive, again, using that term constructive. So that's another distortion, but those ones are generally self-inflicted.

Yeah. And so, you know, looking at it, and they do a great job and the authors of that book talk about, "Look at it as a feature, not a bug," right? So, why would these be features? Why would these things happening? Like, if I can go back and I realize like, "Oh man, I misremembered something. I didn't get it right." I can think to myself right there and go, "Well, why would, why would my brain do that?" Because the whole point of memories is learning from the past, planning for the future, and emotionally coping, right? It's literally how do we make sense of it, in a sense. Like, how do I learn from this? What do I need to know? So either this doesn't happen again, or it does happen again if it's a good thing, right? How can I seek out this in the future because this was really good for me, or stay away from it in the future because it's really bad for me? And then how do I handle what this is emotionally? Because physically is one thing. Your body's going to repair itself in the way it can. You don't really have control over that, but you have influence over the emotional coping part. And so if I don't have maybe skills to deal with it, or I don't categorize it correctly, maybe I look at, you know, someone said something to me that was criticism, and I took it the wrong way. Maybe they didn't mean it to be a negative thing. They were trying to improve me, but like I said, "This person's an ass. I'm fine at that." Well, I might never get better at that if that's the way I look at it. And so now you're in that negative feedback loop, which is not going to help anybody.

But, you know, and I've had people say something to me before, and they were being jerks, but there was a little bit of truth in what they said. So I went, "Well, yeah, this person's a dick," and they were just speaking out and whatever, but like, what was it that caused them to say that about me? And I went, "Oh yeah, like here's a little part of that past interaction that I could get better at." Even though that feedback was not constructive, not meant to be constructive, you can still take it that way versus just putting the wall up and saying, "Oh, well, I'll never do that again." Or, "You know what? That didn't mean anything because that person's an idiot." It's like, like I always tell people, it's like when you get that feedback, you know, everyone's always surveys and this and like, you know, if you're filling out a personal feedback about your thoughts and feelings on something, it's kind of like, "Meh, it might be important," you know, maybe there's some value in there. But just taking a survey about self-reporting different, especially when it comes to behaviors or thoughts.

What do you think about you?

Yeah, it's like it's not the best gauge. Because one, you're going to think you're better at things that you that you aren't. And two, you're also going to bash yourself over things that you might not really be that bad at. You just feel like you are. So, so there's this big gap there.

One of the few reasons that I do like peer review, and I'll give you an example of that. You can get any corporal or lance corporal or private to tell you it was the best training they ever took. You can get a police officer from a smaller agency that doesn't get training very often to come to your big, in-city training that you've rehearsed and say it was the best training they've ever had. But when you get your doctors or your peers or the people that are industry leaders and they come and go, "Holy crap, that was great," that's when you need to start listening. So if you if you challenge your recall in that same way, you could recode for best recall. Does that make sense?

Well, and it's what you know, not what your thoughts and feelings are about it, because that can obviously be heavily influenced by so many different factors. It's like sort of what were, what were your behaviors after? What changed after? What were the outcomes that were different later on? Because I've seen that before where people were like, "Well, yeah, you know," and I saw that at a training course where someone was like, "Well, yeah, you know, it was kind of, it's kind of average or whatever. I didn't really learn a whole lot," and, "or, you know, it's basic," or "it's this." And then they went out and did, they got put into a situation that they had just learned about in training and did exactly what they were supposed to do and knocked it out of the park. And they just thought that they just knew how to do that. It was like, "Dude, you didn't know that two days ago," right? But like, but we do that as human beings.

Like, I love that. That's a coping mechanism, Brian. And so the idea is that this goes back to the authors again and why both of us like the book. The idea is that they're saying, "Look, these aren't maladaptive strategies. These are hardwired, and many times they're deliberately vague to allow you to learn and recall things wrong so you can fix them. And that's part of the learning process." So, you don't want to injure yourself so severely that you can't, you know, come back from it. But it's okay to have an emotionally distressing, like your first breakup, or the first time somebody told you no for a situation. They're meant to evoke a certain response. So, you learn from that response. "Hey, wait a minute. There are a left and right lateral limit. There is a limit of advance." And the sooner that you learn that, you know that... how many times have you seen a person that like, I'll give you one, a prediction on Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is not going to go gently into that good night because Tom Cruise is constantly trying to top his previous performance and doesn't like using CGI. So if you hear about him falling to his death or the plane crashing or something, you're not going to be surprised, are you? You know, but if you hear somebody else, you know, that that's, you know, pays attention to the actuarial tables, if you see that, that's going to surprise you a little bit. So your brain wants to get you to the edge, but it wants to pull you back. And that's why sometimes the red and blue blues get in our way, Brian, because we slide up on a scene of a man with a gun and then we get shot. Holy sh*t, we missed all those cues beforehand because we overrode our circuits with incoming memories, right? And what has to happen is we have to give ourselves the gift of time and distance. Have we considered this before? Have we experienced this before? Is there somebody else that has that I can ask them about this? But we're not wanting to do that, you know.

And one of the questions I get, people always want to know, "Well then, how do I improve my memory or how do I get..." And there's the people that do like the memory tricks and count cards, and you can practice that skill set, but that's not really what we're talking about, right, in this where we're trying to recall information. And the whole point about the thing about memory is like it's like that you have an infinite amount of space, and your brain could literally, there's no limit to what you can store in your memory, but it goes back to the recall and how you recall. That's where things, that's where things get kind of get in the way because your brain wants to go, "Alright, I just want to focus on what's important." So you, just like even, it's funny because it's how like my Mac is, right? I have everything backed up to the cloud. So if I don't open up a folder for a few months, it's no longer physically on my hard drive. It's stored in the cloud. It boots it up there, and then it has to download it and allow me to open it. Well, it's just like your brain. It does.

I wonder where they got that idea.

I know, right? It's like it just throw it back there. We don't need this. And so people say, you know, say, "Well then, how do, how do I work on my recall?" You can do that with like, you know, when you talk about writing things down on exactly what happened and then recalling and telling that story almost as a script over and over again can get you better, but you're still going to start to fill some stuff in. So, it's never going to—

So, let me ask you this though, and you're spot on. I absolutely agree with that. But, and listen to people that do after-action reviews, and I've been trying to think of his name, out at the young captain out at the infantry immersive trainer that did a paper on this and is going to has his PhD soon. Mac, he's a colonel now.

You serious?

Holy sh*t, I'm old. Well, Finel got it at hello. And the idea is that how important is an after-action review? Well, an after-action review touches on the psychological, but it also touches on the sociological, Brian, because an after-action review is not just to say, "Here's where we can get better," or "Here's the weaknesses." It's to go over the accurate story. It's so everybody shares the story and you can correct outliers and go, "No, Tommy, that wasn't a sniper. That was an IED going off." Or, "No, those were gunshots, not balloons popping in the mall." So an after-action review has so many more purposes to coding properly coding memories.

That's if if done correctly, because that's also when things can go, get everything can get skewed, and the whole memory is changed. And now the story is very different than from what actually happened because we've reinforced each other's, or someone brought something up that was wrong, but people went, "Oh, I didn't know that." Now it's part of that that story of what happened. And that's that's a, that's a big problem, right? When you get into those group, you know, "This is what I saw. This is what you saw," or "This is what we think happened." And then, "Now here's the story we're coming up with." It's like, well, there's going to be seams and gaps in there. You're never going to have it 100% correct. It's just, you know, even, even, it's not designed that way, right?

Well, but think about it. Even like, you know, you said that the camera doesn't lie, but it also doesn't capture the whole story, right? You can have a camera on something, but that doesn't capture the mood in there. That doesn't capture everything that's going on. So, there's, you know, there's a few things in there.

Alright, Greg, we're going to take a quick break there, just right back at it. But one other thing that we did want to discuss with memory is imagination. So, how does that impact or affect my memory? How can it change it? And what role does just our own human imagination play in this?

Yeah. So, here's a fight that we're going to continue to have with simulation and virtual reality folks because we've been in the game for a good long time. And they sometimes are so excited by their new discoveries that they don't think outside the box or inside the box. They think future, and they don't think current. What do I mean by that? Our imaginations are hugely important. And that's why we like games. And so if part of the simulation is a game where we have to use our imagination and think through a situation and not just shoot through it or fight through it, we'll come out of that sweating, and we'll come out of that with a memory that's lingering and lasting. "Hey, can I stop and try that again?" Yeah, of course you can because it's in a simulation. Wouldn't it be great if we could do that on the road?

So imagination reinforces the nature of a human because we're creative beings. If we weren't, we'd never get out of the cave. Then we'd never invent the wheel. And then we'd never think about the Fulton and the steam engine and everything else that's going on. So, our memories are subject to our simulations. For example, a daydream or masturbation, or "Oh my God, wouldn't it be good to go to a theme park this summer?" Or, "Hey, I'm going to rent a hotel room this weekend because I don't have air conditioning." Those things where we're projecting things that haven't occurred or occurred a long time ago reinforce the good memories and take away the bad memories, or they let us try before we buy. "Wow. What might happen on that one? I might get involved with this person, and then my wife is going to fire a significant other, and I'm going to get a divorce." So the point is we can misremember better and create new factors that weren't part of the original memory, and those can be constructive. Now they can also be destructive. So that's the problem with our imagination.

Yeah, but that, so but this is where it gets into and when I use the term simulation training, I'm not just talking about on a computer screen or a headset or something. Anytime you're doing a, let's say, training scenario and you're doing something, whatever it is that you're going through, you've got some role players, and that's simulation training. You're simulating something that you're likely to see again in the future. So, and your brain loves that.

But that's the thing is that—

That's why the imagination part is so important, and that's why we're talking about memory too, because from a training aspect, you can create memories that are good enough to use for the future. Remember, it's all about what the brain doesn't care. The point behind memory is for to use it for some utile purpose in the future to either do something good or save yourself or, you know, repeat something or stay away. So, you can create and construct that, and it just has to have enough cognitive fidelity to get your imagination going, right? And say, "Okay, my brain is constructing a memory." Even though it's in training, even though it's not a real situation, it's real enough for your brain so that going forward it remembers that when you're in something that's cognitively close enough and it goes, "Oh sh*t, I've been here before." And now you know what to do because obviously that's what the training part was for. But it's quite, it's really that simple. But sometimes remember like people focus on all the wrong things. Or, remember with the military stuff, it's like, "Alright, we've got to get people who speak this dialect of Arabic," and this. And it's like, "No, no, no, no. You want to simulate a language barrier. So have them speak Klingon. It doesn't matter. You want to simulate this." It doesn't have to be the specific thing that you're going to, unless you're doing some very specific rehearsal for some very specific mission. But that's not what typical training is, right? So, it's what are those compounds that happen in all of—

Right. And then I can create a story. Right? That's why we say, the brief you give, the direction before they ever walk in is the most important part. We tell everybody that'll listen, that's important. And we also say, "I want you to consider a Faber Egg." Do you remember the old ones that came around the holidays where I could peek into it and see the little village and it was all dressed up for whatever event that was going on? Can you imagine with the hobberman, and of course there's always the Jack-in-the-Box because you have to take into consideration the things that you didn't consider. That's how we learn. But I have to be able to dial it back and say, "Okay, tac-freeze. Stop right now. Look into the Faber Egg. Here's what you're not seeing. Here's the negative space and the dead space." Would that change your timeline? Would that influence how you're going to pick cover with these things? Now look, your brain's already doing that, but reinforcing it by stopping and starting training and starting with a coach outside and have a mentor go, "Stop. Do you want to try that again?" Do you want to do those things are so constructive because that's how your brain works already. So what's happening is we're looking for an fMRI and getting a difference in the ganglia and do that all that. Yeah, it's all wonderful stuff, but look, you can recall the critical incidents and, and look, why do we think, we just talked about an AAR (After-Action Review). How many different terms are there now where people are making money for AAR and how to do it? And then somebody says, "Yeah, but you can do it in business. You can do it after a business meeting." It's all the same sh*t. The idea is you have to construct it in a manner where it's a rigid progression of things that happen. So the brain goes, "Oh, it's a piece of candy. Oh, it's a game." And then the brain game theory takes over and it goes, "Okay, well, how do I game the game?" And that's how you do it because now I understand that that holster and the number of rounds and the flashlight and how many lumens and all that other stuff. We're putting so much stuff into the simulation to make it real, it doesn't have to be that hyperrealistic. What it needs to be is it needs to be something that's challenging to the brain where they go, "What about that guy? What's that shadow? What's behind that door?" Because the more inquisitive you are earlier on, the more likely you are to save a life. And that life may be early.

And because of how recall and memory and cognition and decision-making work, you're unconsciously arriving at decisions before you're consciously aware of. There's a great one. I don't want to get into it today, but there's another book I've got to send you. It's really good, but the whole topic is so like we could do a whole series on it. But what they showed in some of these experiments too with the EEGs and the couple different measurement tests, they put people through little decision-making tests, and they said, "Okay, when you think you've arrived at the, when you consciously aware of what your answer is, press this button," right? And so then they're measuring, and they were measuring sometimes 2, 3, 10 seconds before they pressed that button, their brain lit up with the answer. So meaning unconsciously it was already there, and then it took some time for them to be consciously aware of it, which speaks to exactly what you were talking about with how do I set something up to learn from this so I don't have to learn everything the hard way, right? And I can use it again in the future because if it's real enough, I will unconsciously arrive at the correct answer given the set of circumstances if it's close enough to something I've seen before in the past.

You're exactly right. So, can I share my favorite Family Guy episode of all time? It's when Stewie is berated by Brian on the couch at the house, and Stewie walks away, and as he walks away he comes up and goes, "Oh, I should have said this." So, the entire rest of the episode is Stewie constructing a time machine so he can go back and say the right thing. And so now he degrades Brian each time because he goes back to that time machine every time. That's what a simulator is. That's what virtual reality is. So you can go, "Holy sht! You know what would have worked better? If I would have gone to the left and this..." And so if you have a machine played out, you get to see it. Exactly. Where you can play that out and then you can discuss it with another Brian. If you can't discuss it in real time and make corrections in real time, then it's worthless. You're going to go, "Yeah, but I increased my shot spray time to reload whatever." All of these sht things that you think are important might be important to your company and the game now, but are they really? Are they really changing how a human being thinks about the process?

So true The Human Behavior Podcast thinking means that we have to consider all of those aspects before we get into the situation and then be far enough away to see them implemented because you're making decisions faster. You're not waiting for that thing and then go, "Oh, this is what I need to do. Now I have to react to this. Now I have to react to that." So, if you create a game where the person can outthink it and call their own tac-freeze and go, "I feel that this is going to go sideways and no matter what interventions I use, this guy's about to attack me, and I'm going to have to use lethal force," then you should be able to win, and then they should give you a lawn chair, and you can sit down and watch it play out. Watch it play out because that's as important to your brain as ever pulling the trigger. And right now, the old gosh darn culprits that are against us on this, they're sitting there going, "No, it's not true." Well, it's backed up by science. There's more tests on my side than on your side, you know. But you see, Brian, it might not be as much fun as standing on a skid and using a Vulcan to spray a crowd. "They were innocent. It was an innocent protest." What is that movie with Schwarzenegger, the Total not Total Recall? The what with Richard Dawson where he goes goes back through, The Running Man. It's an old Stephen King book. And The Running Man, you'll see the part of the movie I'm talking about. Jesus, I'm old.

But the idea, Brian, is I would say to you, use your game to create selective memory, to imprint selective memory and create a module where you can go, "Hey, listen, last time I was in this situation, it went easy, but here are considerations I'm making now that don't make sense." Because in that turbidity, Brian, in that incongruent signal hides the danger. So, you should have enough of those early on where the person can say, "That lock's too new for that door. That license plate is clean, but the rest of the car is filthy." Do you get what I'm trying to say? "Hey, why would somebody put a rag on that part of their column?" All of those things that we encounter, and guess what, Brian? Then I can do that game over and over and over again till I start to master those skills. I'm afraid of terms like subject matter expert or skill mastery, but still, it's going to get us close enough. And cognitively close enough is a win, Brian, in my book.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that's, I mean, just everything that we talked about, that's the key concept for your brain. That's all it cares about. It just cares about, is it enough information to be utile to use this for some purpose in the future? I don't give a damn about the little details of what, "Maybe it was a black shirt, not a white shirt. It was a red hat, not..." Those things don't matter as much as the actions and the feeling that you had and the conceptual understanding of what occurred. That's your brain saying this is... Now the problem is, we don't consciously choose what those things are. Our brain chooses for us. So those inputs might be sort of incorrect. Does that make sense?

Right. But we can get more in tune. We can be more synchronous. We can be closer, more closely aligned if our training, Brian, this goes right back to our argument with training. If you're sitting in a chair staring straight at the screen, everybody, nobody has the ability to move around the table or interact with the instructors. You get what I'm trying to say? You're not going to learn as much. And then people say, "Well, people learn at a different rate." No, we all learn at the same exact rate or we wouldn't have any of the similar, we wouldn't have similar poems. We wouldn't screw the same way. We wouldn't read books. There are certain things that we just have to. People are the same all over the world. Wow. Great person said that one time. Brian. So I say that distortions are and biases are good for us in many instances, and if we learn selective memory to be constructive, it can be a powerful learning force. They are designed in a constructive manner for purposes of survival. That's what it's designed for. So if that tool is being used in a manner for which it was not designed to be used, well, that's the problem. It's not the tool that's the problem. It's the use of that tool. Right?

And we expect an outcome and we don't know why we can't get to the outcome. What's inhibiting it? So we say it must be the learner. It must be the student. And wait a minute, your methodology could be flawed as well.

And guess what I go to? I go back to peer review, and my peers that are in the same business go, "No, you're right. F*ck."

Well, yeah. And those are, that's a, that's a, again, it's the interaction. It's the relationship between in in a training environment especially, it's an interaction between the person conducting the training, the person receiving the training. That's a, that's a, it's not on—

Yep.

It's not on one or the other. It is on both. And so like you could have the greatest student in the world, and if it's a shitty teacher, they're not learning. The greatest teacher in the world, if it's a shitty student, they're not learning.

Let's throw that on a pile and see if it sticks. You've seen me countless times at the very inception of a course, walking through and meeting people that are coming into the course and having a seat. And you always see me go for a certain type of individual and go after them. Can you describe what that individual is like and why?

It's usually, well, what I would get, the reason why you do it at first and go talk to those people before even get started, is to break down some barriers because it appears that there's some sort of barrier or there's some attitude. They've got a chip on their shoulder even coming into the training. But we don't but, you know, and the reason why you're going up is to go, "Well, why is it?" Is it because they're at this training or are they going through a divorce? Did they get a car accident on the way here? Like, what does it have—

They have to leave in 15 minutes because they've got a conference call out in the hallway and they really wanted to look forward to the beginning of the training. Remember, I was telling you what I was training one of the SEAL teams, and I'm like, "This isn't going well. These guys are pissed. They're going to kill me." They're going to arms cross, and then during the break the chief's like, "Hey, we need to take a little bit longer break." I'm like, "Hey, everything good?" He's like, "We need, we just had some new guys show up. We want to get them all in there, and this is this is such great training." "I was so used to, I'm so pissed that no one ever taught me this before. I've been in this for..." And I'm like, "Oh, thank God! Because I was ready to eat your gun."

Yeah. Yeah.

So, add to this one, folks, if you're still listening, here's one for free. So, we're at Liberty University. We always have an eclectic crowd there, and we absolutely love Liberty. I can't wait to get back there, but it's always different. Always different. And always so wonderful to do. So, on this day, it's just pouring rain outside, and so Brian, I have to run to the car. The doors are locked. We finally get somebody to open the door. We get to the room, and there's a problem with the electric in the room, but the room is half full already, and it's 10 minutes before we get there. And so that's a full 45 minutes before anytime. And we're like, "Wow, these people must really love us!" And we look, and it's the worst crew of people. A woman with a poodle, two guys that are in their 80s, one person in a walker. It's not our normal set, right? And so I have to, so I walk over and I ask, I go, "So you folks are here for Navigate?" And they look and they go, "Oh, this isn't bingo. It's Saturday. It's supposed to be bingo." And do you remember it was right next door at the Hall of Th. And so it was so funny because your expectations. So the reason I play pinball around the room is because I want to see what their expectations are. Somebody's angry because they don't have free coffee. Somebody's angry because they just didn't have a sitter that morning, and we're going to arrive late. But the idea is to be in the right mental mode to accept that training and immerse yourself in the training is so important. And that's why we advocate the hallway before going into whatever scenario that you're going to do. And then a brief explanation and a trial period. "Hey, if you want to yell or run or do a push-up, let's do it out here before we get in there." And then when you're in there, at any time if you want to look at me and stop and go, "Hey, wait a minute. This is so novel. I need help." That's okay to do because I'd rather you do, you know, the old bleed on the mat, Brian. I'd rather you bleed on the mat than bleed on the street.

Yeah. Alright. Well, that was, that was, that was a lot about memories, but hopefully people got our perspective on it and how to look at it, understand it that this is something that's inherently flawed, but that's okay. It's not, it's designed that way. So if we understand that, and focus on kind of those details and recall and writing things down, you can get better at it and like you kind of brought up in even in the training space too, but we we can sort of prime ourselves to what's important. I'm going into this situation, whatever that is. What are some things that I'm going to need to know and need to remember and need to recall? Because then you will autonomically, without even realizing it, start to focus on those things. So, if it's bad, like we see, what is the, you know, that's why we bash those things like, "Oh, a pre-attack indicator." Okay, well, great. If you see that, then you're going to think you're under attack even when you're not. So, and the outcomes are going to be significantly different, right? So, but, and that's what it is, is you can get better at this contextually. But it's not just like a sort of a general skill unless you're—

Everything is contextually. What do I need to know before I walk into this restaurant because I'm not sure I've never eaten here before? So, do I want to pick up on prevent indicators that this might not be a good meal and leave before I sit down? Right? I'm going to talk to the insurgent, you know, my daughter. Like, what do I need to know? Where's she at in this so that I can look for whatever it is I need to look for? It's just those simple things. If you back-plan with your Google Maps to figure out how to stop at Starbucks before your event and still have time to set up, then that's no different than giving your brain the best chance at your survival. If you understand how the system works, if you understand the rigid rules and the ones that aren't so rigid, you're going to be better at understanding the signals that your brain is trying to tell you. So, that needs to be a function of your training. No matter if it's self-defense or edge weapons or impact weapons or driving, you have to integrate it into your current training regimen. And look, if you've got time for an on-duty roll call, you've got time to talk. Look, Brian, today in just an hour, we talked all over memories. We talked a little bit about virtual reality. We talked about dreams. We talked about phantom limbs and unconventional approaches to training. So, you can do it, folks. You just have to set your sights on, "This is scientifically valid, and it will change my bottom line." You know, is the juice worth the squeeze?

Yeah. Well, we covered a lot. And there's always more on the Patreon, and I always do like an episode recap and some of the takeaways for our folks on there. So, if you're trying to take notes or thought that was something good, I usually give the breakdown for everyone when the episode comes out. So, always hit us up on there, and we do appreciate our Patreon members who are on there giving us great suggestions. So, thanks everyone for tuning in. If you enjoyed it, please remember to share it with a friend. Give us a thumbs up, all that good stuff. It really helps out a lot. Helps get the message out there. Send it to someone who you might be interested in. And thanks so much. And don't forget, training changes behavior.