We all conveniently forget that at school we had homework, tests, chores to do, parents’ rules to live by and other struggles associated with it.

They look at life through rose tinted glasses. These glory days, as they remember them, were the happy times. When they feel frustrated or tired of their lives, they remember the good times, the Glory Days, in high school when they had the world by the tail. Glory Days talks about how we reminisce about life at school and Bruce describes the people he knew in high school – a baseball pitcher with a wicked fastball and a high school beauty who could charm any boy. For example, Bruce Springsteen, or the Boss as he is known, had a famous song in the 80’s that illustrates this. The phrase, ‘we look at life through rose tinted glasses’ illustrates this point. Over time, the combination of these two accounts blend together to create your memory. Then, as you remember the event, your mind colors in the details with the emotions, which can alter the facts slightly and provide inaccuracies. This would be the day, the place where you were, what you were doing at the time, etc. To summarize Nader’s work simply, you have an outline of facts in your memory based on what actually happened. His findings, which are based on experiments with rats, create a theory that humans and other animals may not be able to remember any event without altering it in some way based on their emotional reaction to the experience. Karim Nader, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, is studying how these two versions combine to create a memory. In an experience there are two parts the facts, and the emotions. We remember key events as they are linked to our emotions. I remember like a knife to my heart when my wife Lorraine told me my Mom had died. The more intense the emotions, the more the memory will stand out. How many times have two people been at the same event and remembered different things? How many times have you thought you had said something, only to be told by 5 people you didn’t say what you thought you had remembered saying? Our memory is triggered and enhanced by many things, but many memories are triggered by emotions. Of course, you are thinking, aren’t the experience and the memory of the experience the same thing? They are not. In my blog post, Why Your Memory Matters More Than Your Experience, I go into detail about how the memory of a Customer Experience is actually more important than the Customer Experience itself, as a returning Customer will return based on their memory of their experience, and this memory can be changed. Professor Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate, says we don’t choose between experiences we choose between the memories of these experiences. They become the subject of folklore and they are embellished and changed. We relive these moments, we love reconnecting with them, but over time these memories change. How many times have you been with a group of friends or family and you relive a past experience? Everyone is smiling and laughing as you recall some episode in your life.

How we create memories & why this is critical to business

Create memories