Kira (Kira Greene)

So we do tend to think about things that have a lot of emotional resonance for us, either positive or negative.

And one of the interesting things about that is that people tend to have very high confidence in those memories that they're particularly salient, that they think are particularly important.

Like you mentioned, the birth of your child or, you know, like an accident that you were in or, you know, something kind of really that's maybe personal or of national or international importance, but that has some huge salience for you.

You'll tend to remember that with really high confidence, but that confidence often doesn't come paired with actually very high accuracy.

So when it comes to those highly emotional memories, our confidence in them can actually be misleading.

So that salience, that emotional resonance can really lead us to thinking about those memories a lot, which means we're engaging in that act of reconstruction process a lot more frequently.

And that actually means we're in a way creating more opportunities for errors to creep into those memories.

Yeah, so I think it is important to recognise that we all forget these kinds of things all the time.

So I think Shelley spoke very eloquently there about her issues with ADHD and those attentional issues that can also, of course, very much play in with memory issues.

But most of us, I think it's what's important to understand is that when somebody is diagnosed with a condition like ADHD or even maybe somebody who is aging and concerned about their memory with age, is that they become much more kind of laser focused on these kind of failures of memory and see everything as, oh God, that's a symptom.

Whereas if, you know, you take somebody who doesn't have this condition or isn't concerned about it, they just won't tend to worry about these kinds of day-to-day failures.

I was having a conversation the other day with a lady who was an older lady and she was talking about how, you know, she really got lost trying to find the room that we were meeting in in this building where I work.

It's this really enormous, sprawling building.

And I was saying, you know, like I get lost in this building all the time and I've been working here for 10 years.

If you were 25 and you got lost in that building, you would blame the building.

You wouldn't blame your memory.

But then in terms of kind of practical things that you can you can do.

Firstly, it's really boring, but a lot of the time it's just having procedures.

So it's just having things like habit is actually one of the most effective ways of helping with those kinds of day to day and kind of lapses of attention.

So things like having a place, a really visibly obvious place where you always put your keys.