Twixmas and thinking of the future

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It's the space between Christmas and New Year where time, at least whatever concept of

time you have, is weird.

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Today's post is a collection of thoughts about memory and goal setting and some

interesting research that is starting to merge in the field of psychology.

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I hope you enjoy.

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So in psychological terms, it makes...

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total sense that the way we perceive the calendar weeks gets distorted over this festive

period.

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You know, our routines are shifting and changing and the things that anchor the start and

end of our weeks, the ebb and the flow, they're all modelled up or not happening at all.

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There's also something about the countdown or the Advent to Christmas that builds up

anticipation only for it to be followed by this waiting period, this liminal period.

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before the universal fresh start of the new year.

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And this probably distorts our thinking.

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The space in between always makes me think of a roller coaster ride.

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But research shows that how you are perceiving this time and how I'm perceiving this time

are likely to be very, very different.

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The most obvious way in which we start to perceive time is through physical and cultural

constructs.

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If you live in a Western culture, then you'll be used to calendars and watches, that

electronic timekeeping.

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Also, we have this Monday to Friday working week.

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Perhaps you go to park run every Saturday.

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These are all things that influence the way we think about time.

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And how we visualise future time is intriguing because I always assumed that everyone had

a big long virtual timeline in their head.

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I've got one.

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It's about to curve back on itself because we're starting a new year.

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And I can see those months ahead quite clearly.

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There's a linear timeline, which is punctuated by some memorable dates.

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And these, you know, occur like road signs as I approach them.

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Valentine's Day in February, a 10K race in March, and a family holiday that I'm really

excited about going on in July.

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But perhaps your mental imagery is more circular.

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Or does it look like a calendar grid?

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There are cases of people who have really vivid memories and visualizations.

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And these people can also experience seeing words and sounds of specific colors and tastes

too.

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And their calendars appear as very vivid things.

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They're like the real thing hanging on the wall.

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And they can describe flicking through them mentally.

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But I suspect that my logical brain is less visual.

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20 years of managing very complex projects has contributed for sure the way that I think

about a timeline in my head.

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Although I think I've probably always seen time as a linear thing.

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So much to their bewilderment, I asked my mom and sister via WhatsApp how they thought

about time to see what our differences were.

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My mom sees like a wall calendar.

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and she thinks of months as numbers, so September is nine, and that feels very logical.

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And my sister was more linked to a visual representation of an electronic calendar, an

Outlook calendar.

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So went and asked more people, and I said, well, how do you think about time?

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Expecting somebody somewhere to say, yes, I've got a big timeline in my head, Leela, and

it's just like yours, except they didn't.

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So.

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I started to wonder about how that we think about or how we construct our visual future.

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And the psychology and research in this area is just fascinating.

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know, as psychologists, we know that our ability to think about the future is possibly

linked to our autobiographical memory.

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And this is the stuff that stores all those key things in our life, things like learning

to ride your bike.

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a first kiss or a family holiday.

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They're all things that are stickier than the average everyday event.

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And what's more, we know that we have fewer of these events as we get older because we

have less novel experiences.

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It leads to a really interesting phenomenon called the reminiscence bump.

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This is why the nineties will always be the best decade for me for music.

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I had more novel experiences during the 90s.

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I went to my first gig.

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I had my first kiss.

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I met my husband.

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So there's a lot all kind of associated with that visual and physical memory that I have.

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There's also a theory that this reminiscence helps us to remember more details of an event

too.

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So we know that when we want to memorise something for an exam, for example, that a delay

in a break in remembering is really helpful in consolidating our memory.

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It helps us to be more accurate in the retrieval of them.

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So that's why you might see that exam revision techniques have breaks built in.

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It's not because our brains get tired, more that

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the process of remembering and not forgetting is aided by having those breaks.

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But above all of this, there are lots of individual differences and environmental things

that are happening which can change the way that we remember and forget memories.

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When I had to memorize an essay on cognition for my psychology qualification, I decided to

pick out research on drunk people.

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I thought it'd be slightly amusing and scientific and I thought, well, if I rehearse this

information and it's interesting, it will stick in my head longer.

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And it worked.

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It's important for us to understand how credible the memory is after consuming alcohol.

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So there was an applied reason for wanting to research that too.

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In witness testimony in the UK at least, police procedures

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don't encourage the formal interviewing of witnesses who are visibly drunk.

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They're not routinely breathalysed because there's no criminality for being drunk, really,

unless you're being disorderly at the same time.

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Yet when asked, jurors and judges support the view that under the influence testimony is

less credible than a sober witness.

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But the lab studies don't show that.

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The lab studies show consistently that memory recall is unaffected.

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by a level of intoxication.

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Now, I suppose there is a slight difference here between being intoxicated at the limit,

which is too much for driving in the UK and heading towards a total blackout.

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Obviously, the more you drink, the less you will remember.

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But the quality of the memories that you do form seems to be quite good.

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So it's not an unfounded bias for these judges and jurors to distrust the

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testimony of people who were drunk at the time.

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We know that drugs in general impair the way that episodic memories are stored.

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But interestingly, a body of research suggests that it's the quantity rather than the

quality of memories that's impacted when drunk, at least up to a point.

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Intoxicated witnesses are more selective of the memories they report because perhaps they

hold back.

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the vague details.

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They want to report less than the sober person because they might not remember as much.

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But another thing goes on because alcohol also dampens anxiety and when we're in an

anxious state we remember more details.

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So perhaps there's a second effect with alcohol which means that we just don't remember as

much.

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Again it's that quantity over quality conversation.

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It makes sense, though, that the scientific facts are blurry around the impact of alcohol

on memory, because after all, it's tricky to conduct experiments on drunk people.

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They don't follow instructions well.

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And there's a question of what is an ethically safe level of intoxication?

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How does that relate to the real world as well?

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And how suggestible are people and how might they be, you know, manipulated by unethical

researchers?

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For this reason, there are relatively few in the field or pub psychology experiments that

look at the experience of being drunk on memory recall in real life.

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However, for my exam prep, I did find an interesting study.

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And this was at the Maastricht University in the Netherlands.

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So they recruited people who were drinking and half of those people were questioned

immediately.

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And the other half were questioned in a delayed way.

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everybody was questioned later on around their recall.

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And the results of this study suggested that immediate recall is better for accuracy.

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And that has an implication, doesn't it, for them, the practice of waiting for someone to

sober up before questioning them.

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There are many, many reasons to be dubious about research that happens in pubs, but it is

interesting to think about the way in which our life events and episodes need both time to

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percolate

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and be recalled and when they don't, and also how we remember and forget things.

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And you might be wondering, well, why are you telling me all of this?

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Well, this liminal space between Christmas and New Year's is a natural reflection and

reminiscence point for humans.

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And it leads into a big collective and cultural fresh start of the new year where we're

encouraged and motivated to set new goals and try new things.

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But here's the thing, writing down goals and visualizing outcomes are very effective ways

of using our memory to anticipate the future.

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Some people have highly superior autobiographical memories.

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That's a real term.

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know, there's a group of people like super smellers or super tasters who have this

elevated imagination and visualization of future scenarios.

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And we're really interested in those people and we're just starting to understand how that

visualization works.

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Before that group of people, there's also another group who don't or can't visualise the

time or future events at all.

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And then we have people with different time perspectives.

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This might be something you more readily associate with autism or ADHD.

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And it alters the way in which people think about and approach and deal with events.

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So the research in all of these areas is very fascinating.

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and of course not covered by that pub experiment, with no way of knowing which category

did those people fit into.

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Is it a category?

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And I predict that over the next decade, the way in which we start to set goals and

resolutions is going to be more impacted by the types of research that's going on around

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the different ways we think about motivation and visual cues.

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We're only just starting to understand the difference between those who do

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and don't see images in their mind's eye.

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In fact, it was only this year that we found the first biological evidence of that

difference in measuring pupil dilation.

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My hope is that we see more research that explores divergent ways of processing because

the types of people I have coached in the past and continue to work with are not

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necessarily what we would call one type of thinker or

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they don't perceive time in a very standard way.

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What is the standard?

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I'd always assumed that everybody saw a timeline when they thought about time.

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If you are thinking about what you'd like to achieve this year, I think it's worth

reflecting on the type of techniques that are going to work with the way that you

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experience time.

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And that starts with thinking, well, how do I experience time?

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Perhaps mood boards will excite your vivid visual memory.

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Timelines might thrill your logical brain.

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Welcome to the club.

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Or do you need to hear or read something that sits with your narrative in your head?

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If you have got a big goal for 2023, last year I wrote about the layering effect of goals

and what that does, it gets you to think about the recent past.

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So this is one way to avoid that reminiscence bump when you're setting a goal.

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It might help you set something that is achievable rather than something that's less

realistic from a younger you.

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And I always recommend the psychologist Katie Milkman.

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Her research is centred around habits and habits for change, but she's also written quite

extensively, and you'll see this in the newspapers over the next couple of weeks when she

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does interviews, about fresh starts, when they do and when they don't work.

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Have a happy new year.