Friendships and memory effects
Within a few steps of getting off the plane at Newark on my way to Princeton, I could feel myself traveling back in time as well as in space.
I spent 7 years in Princeton as a research assistant and PhD student, thinking about human forgetting and new computational approaches to studying the brain.
I've been back once or twice in the 6 years since I graduated, but a lot has changed. For starters, I'm married now and accompanied by my wife. I manage the engineering team at Big Health, rather than working as a researcher in a lab. I spend most of my time in Florida and San Francisco, rather than Princeton and New York. And I only get to see the friends and colleagues from grad school when our paths cross sporadically and briefly.
So perhaps it's no surprise that I found myself thinking about memory. I was surrounded by old friends and old stomping grounds. And I spent years here thinking about how our recollections degrade, and how they are triggered.
Indeed, it's easier to remember things when you're in the same context that you learned them. This is why it can help to study in the exam room - by laying down your memories in the exam room, you'll find them easier to recall later on the test. Of course, there's a flip side to this - there may be a long-term benefit to laying down memories in a variety of contexts if you want them to be broadly accessible to you later. On the one hand, it's easiest to slip back into old habits with old friends from Princeton in Princeton - but on the other, seeing them in fresh contexts plants those new memories in a wider furrow.
The effects of context can also play tricks. Seeing people in places where you knew them long ago can make it easier to recall the distant memories from that place, than the recent memories laid down in other contexts. This compounds the likelihood of asking questions about things that have long since changed!
Perhaps most of all, I take the most solace in the spacing effect. In short, the spacing effect suggests that the longer you've known something, the deeper its roots in your mind. That is, the longer you've known it, the less often you have to remind yourself of it. It reassures me to think that friendships work the same way.
(first published on Medium)