Understanding vs. Remembering: Why It’s Important to Track (and ...

We tend to place a premium on understanding and underrate the importance of remembering.

We assume that once we comprehend something, we would be able to recall the content. In actual fact, what happens is that fluency gives us an illusion of understanding. We may understand something but are not able to retrieve the relevant knowledge to help our clients.

The thing is, therapists understand a wide array of knowledge. But we sometimes fail to retrieve from our memory bank when we are in therapy (We can’t defer to google to help our memories for this one), things we’ve done well and to do them consistently. 

In many ways, therapists have a negative bias. We remember our blunders, and we are amnestic of our good work. From our good work. we seldom glean its principles so that we can generalise them into other therapeutic contexts.

Another bias: Recency. We tend to remember stuff from the latest workshop that we’ve attended. Less so from old gems.

It’s often the fundamentals that we aren’t able to recall at will.

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Case in point: I’ve been collecting my own “Therapy Learnings” on a weekly basis for more than 3 years now. To date, I’m up to note #226. (See my first blogpost on this topic on how to create A Memorial Practice. See also Develop Your Own Wealth of Learnings ). I’m embarrassed to say, when I look back at my notes, looking only at the header, I can’t recall what was so important that I made me make that note! Who wrote this? Oh my goodness, how did I forget that?

Here’s one way you can test to see if this is true about our inability to retrieve relevant knowledge. The next time your supervisor gives you a useful piece of advice, take note of your own reaction. Chances are, you might be knocking yourself on the head, as you might have known this all along, but have failed to pull out this piece of detail from your repository into the heat of the moment in therapy.

We need to be able to access our storehouse of learnings. The fire of memory needs tending to. Forgetting is actually good for learning[1], once you intentionally activate recall, firing up the neuro-pathway to make those synaptic connections and forging new patterns.

Do your future self a small favor. At the end of each week, in less than 100 words, take 5mins to write down ONE KEY LEARNING you want to remember.

At the end of every month, look back. Test yourself. Test in order to learn, and not simply learn for the test (as our schooling years would have it).

Aeschylus reminds us that “Memory is the mother of all wisdom.” Understand that our memory, is the gateway to a memorial life.

Footnote:
[1] One of my heroes in learning and memory research Robert Bjork studies the benefits of forgetting. see his team’s research in UCLA: https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research/