The Memory Myth

I'm pleased to share a guest post from Janet Crawford today. Janet and I will be co-hosting a workshop October 17th. I hope after reading this post you'll understand why I'm so excited to hear more from her.It happened again just last week. My brother and I were out to dinner with friends from college when I decided to tell a family story. Mid sentence, he interjected with a correction, “No, no….that’s not exactly right….what really happened was….”I politely conceded that it was possible that I’d gotten it wrong and continued the story, but barely a few lines later, he grinned and rolled his eyes for comic effect, “Here, let me tell it…”I wondered, “Were we describing the same event?  Was my memory really that bad? Was his?  Oh dear! Had I inherited my mother’s charming, but often exasperating tendency to rewrite history so as to be able to tell a more entertaining story?”About 15 years ago, I became fascinated with studying the brain and how, from a biological standpoint, we make sense of reality.  That study has helped me better understand these episodes.It should come as no surprise to anyone with siblings, that disagreement over the content of shared family experiences isn’t unique to my brother and me.  Likewise, in my role as an executive coach, I can tell you there are often as many interpretations of a tense meeting as there are people in the room.  But why is this a universal phenomenon and what does it have to do with the EnneagramThe Memory MythFor a very long time, our understanding of memory resembled a kind of internal video/audio recording system.  Perhaps part of the tape would get lost or erased, but our “equipment’ recorded a shared sensory “reality” and the tapes remained static over time.Neuroscientists will now tell you definitively that it doesn’t work that way.  Even during the original experience, we are all encoding different information based on sets of deeply held patterns through which we filter reality.Over time, those original memories constantly shift based on new information that impacts how we view what happened way back then. Immediately after an event, reports from two individuals won’t be the same.

Our internal filters have us notice different things and interpret them through different stories.  After twenty or forty years of constant re-filtering, the memories often have very little in common.

What are these deeply held patterns and where do they come from? Infants enter into the world hungry for sensory experience. While they delight in their explorations, they are not equipped to make sense of them. They have no roadmaps for how to respond emotionally or intellectually to all that surrounds them.For that, they rely on copying their caregivers’ physiological response to conditions in the environment. Our crude biological logic informs us that our best bet would be to behave as our parents do.  After all, they survived long enough to produce us!If they tense up under certain conditions, so do we.  If they remain relaxed, our infant bodies do the same.  From those physiological expressions, we know to feel fear, anxiety, excitement, openness, guardedness, etc. Little by little, we form a set of fundamental emotional perspectives on the world that will likely endure throughout our lives.Almost all of these basic emotional filters are acquired before the age of 18 months, a critical point in brain development marking the beginning of explicit autobiographical memory.Because our emotional patterns were formed in response to events that preceded our ability to remember them, we don’t “see” our patterns.  Our emotional interpretations and responses just seem like “the way it is.”  They are transparent.It appears that the deepest emotional filters seem to boil down to a handful of patterns, things like our sensitivity to vulnerability, deprivation, abandonment and exclusion.The Enneagram, I believe, may be a very elegant system based on centuries of observational data, for naming and working with those fundamental patterns.  As central to our identity as our emotional programming is, it is possible to rise above it and choose when, how and if to be under its sway.The world is populated with people who carry differing perspectives, stories and filters on reality.  The lesson learned from interactions like the one with my brother is something I carry into all parts of my life.When someone vehemently disagrees with me or misunderstandings crop up, I’m less quick to judge and more likely to ask, “How might my lens be creating a distorted (or partial) view?”My brother and I were both there, we both have a memory and we both have at best only part of the “truth.”  Fortunately, we get that and over the years we’ve gained an appreciation for the unique perspective we each bring to the here and now.  All of us have important relationships where perspectives differ. Whose lens could you understand better and what tools and practices do you need to get there?

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"Applying neuroscience to leadership matters. Science is revolutionizing our understanding of what it is to be human. An explosion of advances in human neuroscience is giving us a window into why people behave as they do and how we can manage our environments and behaviors with others to maximize results. These new scientific findings challenge old assumptions of what it means to lead." - Janet CrawfordJanet Crawford, expert in the application of neuroscience research to coaching and leadership, will explain what’s happening at a biological level when you play out Enneagram habits in our upcoming Insight to Action tele-workshop on October 17. She'll facilitate practical explorations of ways to recognize our patterns and relax their grip. For more on this workshop, click here.