Why do we forget?

Shouty synapses and trying to get out of the house on time

Did I leave the hair straighteners on?

It’s common for me to have this thought as I’m pulling out of the driveway, yet when I go back inside the house, the straighteners are stone cold. The only thing I’m forgetting here is something I’ve automatically done.

Photo by Rich Tervet on Unsplash

I had to laugh when my friend asked me ‘why is getting out of the house in the morning such a monumental faff?’. The long answer on this one is there are many reasons why we trip ourselves up. Motivation levels, self-organisation, cognitive bias, distractions, poor estimating, quality of sleep, and how many people or animals you care for. All plausible reasons why it takes more time to leave the house than we think it should.

For a start, most of us have routines that are linked to specific days of the week, through jobs, volunteering, school runs or caring responsibilities. When this gets disrupted it can throw us of course. Chances are you have a good idea of how long it will take you to get from your house to where you need to be, habits and routines help you get out the door on time. Without them, our perception of time is altered, for example, during the Covid-19 pandemic, psychological time appeared to be affected, the perception of time slowed down for some people, the reality is that without our usual routines and activities, we paid more attention to time.

Motivation impacts our achievement of tasks too, if you’re not motivated about getting to our destination (going to the dentist!) you’re more likely to procrastinate or self-sabotage.

Assuming we are looking forward to leaving the house, we take daily habits and routines for granted, in part, because we’ve practiced enough to run them on autopilot. But psychologically speaking, we can be terrible estimators and get tripped up by a planning fallacy, because we are too optimistic about our ability to get stuff done in the timescale we’ve got available.

Whilst we can estimate time with precision in certain scenarios, we are also subject to temporal illusions that can lead to unconscious time warping. Think about waiting for a bus, or an important phone call, time passes painfully slowly. However, in trying to get out of the house it appears that time runs away from us, suggesting that we’ve underestimated how long it will take, or have failed to account for all the things we need to do, that optimism bias again!

The example I gave of the hair straighteners is interesting because it’s a practiced behaviour that is also associated with the fear of burning the house down. Why do we forget the important things we’ve already done? There’s a phenomenon that’s thought to help us remember unfinished business, named after psychologist Bluma Ziegarnik she observed how waiters were able to recall unpaid orders more easily than tables that had settled their bills, so, it’s generally thought this is a helpful bias that keeps us from forgetting things, but curiously it might also lead to rumination and then self-doubt.

Recent research shows a link between people who have unfinished work tasks getting less sleep over weekends, evidence perhaps that this rumination is an unintended consequence of that ‘unfinished business’ phenomenon. Linking unfinished business with distractions,  we might find the act of getting out of the house more cognitively demanding on our sleep deprived brains, perhaps you have a distraction device, a smart watch on your wrist or phone in a pocket, alerts and vibrations can lead to interruption of our morning routines, a ring doorbell, Alexa notifications could all be adding digital noise to the effort of getting out of the house.

However, before you switch off and go analogue again, swayed by the psychology of distraction which has a disproportionate negative slant, studies actually show mixed reviews on the effects of distraction in our increasingly digital world, distraction does have its benefits.

Individual differences are also going to have an impact on our ability to get out of the house, executive function is the phrase used to describe our abilities around working memory, control, cognitive flexibility, and planning. To use a popular phrase, mental load or lots of stuff on your mind, can lead to failures in planning or flexible thinking. It’s a commonly held myth that we have a mental limit when it comes to memory, but unlike computers our brains are more complex than a fixed storage and recall process, the consolidation process of our memories plays an intriguing role.

To explain this I’m going to use the example of alcohol, researchers have documented the bias of police officers, judges and juries who distrust the testimonies of drunk witnesses. They assume that drunk people have poor memories. But alcohol operates in two ways when consolidating or storing memories, it blocks plasticity in the hippocampus part of our brain but protects from forgetting at the same time.

A side note on brain plasticity.

I think the term brain plasticity is used a lot, and I hardly ever see a description of what it is, so here goes.

Plasticity is referring to the way in which our brain can adapt and change, the way this happens is by cells communicating with each another through synapses. The strength of this communication is important, it’s useful to think of it as a volume dial that can be turned up or down, some times it’s a whisper, sometimes it’s a shout. And cells like to hang out in small or big groups too, imagine a 5 people shouting in a coffee shop and 5000 people singing at a concert, the whispers and shouts are dependent on how many cells are communicating at once, and the energy they bring to the party.

This is what is happens with memory, so the louder the shout between one cell and another the stronger the memory association in the hippocampus which we think of as the long-term memory storage area.

But when we drink alcohol that process is blocked, in the same way as when we enter the REM stage of sleep, it effectively closes the door on the new memories (the fancy term is ‘inducing retrograde amnesia’), the side effect of this door closing is that any newly formed memories benefit from enhanced consolidation, and this protects them from the normal forgetting process. It’s a sliding scale, obviously too much alcohol causes complete amnesia, but lab studies show that moderate alcohol levels result in a surprising recall accuracy because memories have, and for want of a better word, percolated ‘uninterrupted’ by new memories for longer.

The real issue with alcohol is that fewer memories are made because that door closes on the hippocampus, but the quality is surprisingly good for those that were laid down.

Our brains really are amazing, and whilst the hippocampus and its plasticity is one of the most widely researched areas of neuroscience, we still don’t have a complete understanding of how memories are constructed.

When you consider all the things that can throw us off track in a morning, from shouty synapses to sleep deprivation, it’s a wonder we get anywhere on time at all. If you want to improve your chances of getting somewhere, or take the faff out of Monday mornings, sleeping well and establishing helpful routines are great places to start.

Sleep will help with being alert and attentive, routines add a layer of focus onto what you need to do, and visual schedules (calendars) are going to help you when we need to do things outside of your usual and remembered routines.

I might start using a smart plug on the straighteners, being able to control them from my phone feels easier than trying to remember what I might have forgotten to do.