David C. Evans [David C. Evans] - Bottlenecks: Aligning UX Design with User Psychology

Taking steps to enable us to retrieve your brand from memory, as well as our password to be able to use it, will help increase engagement and word-of-mouth recommendations.

So how can you encourage us to remember the longer passwords that, for security reasons, you should force us to make? To understand the neurology of memory retrieval and get it to work in your favor, you need to leverage your understanding of networks, with which you are already no doubt very familiar. With this metaphor, youll quickly see how memes are encoded and retrieved, and youll know how to help ensure we retrieve yours.

As a network, the human nervous system is far more complex than the web. Comparing just one brain to all of Facebook , it has more nodes(100 billion neurons to Facebooks 1.79 billion users), and far more linksor edges (an average of 7,000 synapses per neuron, dwarfing Facebooks 338 friends per user). Synapsesare the connection points between neurons, tiny gaps out at the end of branches called dendriteswhere the signal crosses chemically rather than electrochemically. They are ever-changing, just like our followers on Twitter . New synapses are formed and multiplied, they combine to either turn on or turn off the downstream neurons, and dendrites are fattened or shrunk depending on the strength and frequency of the signal, that is, whether they are used a lot or only rarely.

For most of the last century, the complexity of networks has daunted psychologists. But in recent decades, their theories are embracing network terms and ideas. They now refer to the pathways in the brain rather than areas, the dynamics of mental illness rather than disorders, and semantic networks rather than concepts.

Memory theorists were among the first to retool their theories using network metaphors. They began by discarding the idea of memory as a container. Memory is not a bucket that we fill up any more than a computer hard drive is; both store information by making semi-permanent changes in connections rather than holding things in a place. And we do not have two separate brains for doing and remembering. Instead one brain does both. Thus, recalling a memoryis really about re-igniting the pathways that were active at the moment of the original experience. Seen this way, memories are not movies. When we remember something, we reconstruct what it must have been like, rather than play a video of what it was like. There may be a few fairly accurate images, sounds, and smells sprinkled in, but they are stitched together with assumptions.

In sum, new memories arent stored and saved, theyre linked in and friended. And the more elements we link with them, the more pathways there are to retrieve them.

Psychologists might have realized this decades earlier if an oversimplification of Pavlovs original discovery hadnt obscured it. At the moment Pavlovs dogs were salivating to meat powder, they were not merely associating it with the bell, they were also associating it with the shape of the bowl, the colors in the lab, the smell of the researcher, his coat and facial hair and tone of voice, and even the time of day. In truth, the dogs were networking together all of the elements in their immediate environment into their memory. Pavlov knew this because he saw the dogs begin to drool when he entered the room. But it took until the 1970s for psychologists to recognize that memories are context dependent, that is, they are associated with all stimuli in the environment (both internal and external) that are present at the moment they are formed.

That means you can use any element that was present at the time we learned your meme to help us recall it. Godden and Baddeley demonstrated this vividly on scuba divers in 1975. They had the divers learn lists of words either on dry land or underwater. When the divers learned them underwater initially, they were better at recalling them underwater where it mattered. No special effort was needed to improve recall, no tedious repetition, no laborious mnemonics; the researchers just used the environmental milieu to help reactivate the network of memories in which the target memes were embedded. After this study was published, scuba instructors promptly started teaching lessons at the bottom of swimming pools.

Whats more, you can take steps to enrich the network of retrieval elementsthat are present at the moment we encode your meme. This will give us more pathways to retrieve it. All you need to do is show one or more well-learned memories at the same time you present your new meme. Pair a duck with Aflac, a gecko with GEICO, and a race car with GoDaddy (or an attractive race car driver). If youve ever watched us trying to recall a brand during, say, a focus group, youll observe how we think about and even voice aloud these retrieval elements. You know, the insurance company with the gecko, and the caveman, and the save 15% in 15 minutesGEICO! On a neural level, were igniting well-learned memories in the hope of enervating the new memory, leveraging a process known to neuroscientists as