They Will Forget Most of Today

Much, if not most, of what you experience today will be forgotten by tomorrow.

It's why we write things down. We know that if we don't, we'll "forget." It's why we keep calendars, maintain "to do" lists, and write diaries. We think of these things as memory prompts, but they can also be thought of as ways of extending our minds beyond our bodies. We've not evolved to remember everything on our own, so we devise ways to make sure we don't forget certain things. 

It drives my wife crazy sometimes, but if I want to, say, remember to make a dentist appointment, I'll leave my toothbrush in an awkward spot before going to bed, in the spirit of tying a string around my finger. The idea is that when I see my toothbrush in an odd spot the following morning, it will remind me of what I need to do. If my wife decides to "tidy up" after me and put it away, I'll "forget" to make the appointment. 

There are techniques for improving one's memory (e.g., "memory palaces" or Method of loci), but most of us don't need that level of recall. In fact, for most of us most of the time, it's extraordinarily unimportant.

I'm thinking about memory because I've just returned from a visit with my parents, my brother, and my sister. As you might expect, when the five of us are together, we talk about our memories. At one point, my brother was telling a story about something that had happened to him. It was a familiar story, but in my version, it had happened to me. I realized that my memory had managed to reshape his story as my own.

Experts tell us that literal recall isn't the primary function of memory. As memory researcher Charan Ranganath puts it, "The human brain is not a memorization machine; it's a thinking machine. We organize our experiences in ways that allow us to make sense of the world we live in. To handle the complexities of the world, without falling prey to interference, we exploit one of the brain's most powerful tools for organizing information: the schema . . . A schema is a kind of mental framework that allows our minds to process, organize, and interpret a great deal of information with minimal effort. The way the human brain uses schemas to construct new memories is not unlike how an architect uses a blueprint to design a house. An architectural blueprint functions as a kind of map of the bare-bones information about the structure . . . of a building that shows how everything is connected. The abstract nature of a blueprint means it can be reused over and over."

In other words, it's not so important whether or not we can recall the specifics of what happened (episodic memory), but rather that we recall what we've learned about the world, "regardless of when and where that information was learned" (semantic memory). And quite often, the process of thinking causes us to reshape the specifics of our memories into a more useful story about what must have happened.

My brother and I remember the same story differently because we have different goals, emotions, and beliefs that cause us to interpret the story from our own particular perspectives. This, of course, shapes how we reconstruct our memories.

And that's the most fascinating thing about memories: they are not something we have, but rather something we construct. Indeed, experts tell us that the more often we recall a memory, the more often we've constructed it, the more it tends to stray away from what actually happened. In other words, we re-tell the story, the memory, to fit within our schemas.

This is what the children in our care are doing as they play and why the specific things we try to teach them are relatively unimportant. What they are doing in these early years is building a repertoire of schemas, of blueprints, that will serve them as they move through the world. Indeed, most of us recall very little from before we were five-years-old, but the important learning remains in the form of those schemas. 

At the end of a preschool day, I'm aware that most of what happened, the children will have forgotten by tomorrow, but that doesn't mean they haven't been doing important work. This is why I often do the minimum of tidying up. I try to leave things on the playground and classroom as the children left them. To put them away might well be the equivalent of my wife putting away my toothbrush. This pile of stones, that arrangement of twigs, these costumes on the hooks, may or may not be mind extensions, prompts, that the children have left, intentionally or not, to remind them of where they were and where they were going.

The hope is that they will more readily return to yesterday's play as through no time has passed. They see the stones and remember something about what they were thinking about. They find the cape hanging where they left it and are reminded of who they have been. They discover the half-built structure and know what comes next. Naturally, they may not remember any of this at all. They may look at the stones and see something entirely new. That's how memory works as well. We don't simply retrieve the past, but rather reconstruct it in service of the present.

This is why I'm wary when adults become too concerned about whether children "remember" what they've been taught. We ask, "What did you learn today?" as though learning can be measured by their ability to retrieve information. That's what computers are for. The most important learning, especially in early childhood, is almost never available to us in that form. What's important is the blueprint: what other people are like, what happens when I try, what my body can do, how friendship works, what happens when things fall down, how conflicts unfold, what it feels like to belong.

They will forget most of today by tomorrow. But tomorrow, they will use what they learned today to think.

And perhaps we'll have the good sense not to put away all their toothbrushes.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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