Some days ago, after a long conversation with a friend, I took retrospective notes, recalling what we discussed. (I wrote over 50 items. This is not a small sample.) For parts of the time, we walked; for other parts, we stayed in roughly the same place. Writing the notes, I could tell I was missing up to half of what we said (and forgot the order) for those stationary parts. I had no such issues recalling the walking-concurrent parts.
I’ve noticed this kind of discrepancy a bit before, but this was when it became obvious. Walking as you talk can help a lot towards remembering what’s said.
This may be a quirk of how my mind works and wouldn’t apply to everyone. I doubt I’m totally unique, so it probably at least applies to some other people, even if not everyone.
Why would this work?
This part is justified speculation, not explicitly confirmed, and not important if you’re just using the method.
What seems to be going on here is that my episodic memory encodes the surroundings I see together with the conversation I hear. Later, when I recall the event, I think of what I saw around me to help bring the event to mind, and what I heard (or interpreted at the time from what I heard) comes with it.
I see two ways that the walking helps:
Walking means I’ll be in different places at different stages of the conversation, so each visual memory (exact place and its surroundings) associates to fewer auditory/semantic memories (things spoken), and thus associates more strongly.
Moving in space enforces a continuous path (unless I can teleport, so maybe refrain from teleporting during conversations), which is easy to interpolate and “walk thru” from just a few points — much easier than the unpredictable transitions of conversation.
I don’t know which is more important.
Corollaries and extensions
The mechanism here depends on you moving, not those with whom you speak. If you only care about your own memory (or the circumstances otherwise demand it), you could call them while walking alone and get the same effect. (I have tried this. It works.)
The method should also apply equally well to one-sided speeches to which you listen, tho those tend to be more predictable anyway.
The mechanism here depends on movement and changing surroundings, not specifically walking. I expect you’d get the same effect if you’re cycling/driving/riding a vehicle, so long as you’re observing what you pass by as you do so. That happens to be easy in the case of walking: you have no vehicle to obstruct your vision, and you’re exposed to mild, attention-demanding risk from every direction.
If you care about the order in which things were said, don’t go over the same place twice. Repeating locations makes your path overlap with itself, complicating sequential recall. (This mistake caused a bit of confusion in my example at the beginning.)
Apparently, the brain models some kinds of abstract spaces similarly to how it navigates in real life. (Citation needed. Relevant keywords “hippocampus” and “have you ever played a modern video game?”) You might get the same effect if you move in an intricate video game while you talk. That might require full VR. (I have not tried this.)
This is (related to) a very old idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
I noticed I also recall conversations, podcasts etc better if I was doing some kind of a manual task at the same time (like woodcarving, or just doing the dishes). My interpretation is that focusing on a conversation while immobile is under-stimulating, and thus causes the mind to wander. If one is walking, or doing something physical, its enough physical stimulation to let the mind focus on the conversation in a “railroaded” fashion, without self-distraction.
Even deeper: it feels great to match your walking/activity pace to the emotional message of the conversation. I suppose it triggers the same reaction as ASMR. I suppose its because it lets us “act out” our emotional reaction to the words, without inappropriate gesticulation etc.
Further weak evidence that walking helps with conversational cognition:
- plenty of people, without any cultural connection between them, pick up the habit of pacing around when on the phone.
- it was a well known technique among ancient Greek philosophers and scholars to just take their students on a walk, or even a longer trip while discussing abstract subjects. Apparently it worked very well and was done this way for centuries.
- humans evolved to be semi-nomadic persistence hunters. Walking around all day is our natural state that we evolved for, sitting down for hours is not.
My brain also associates memories with locations, and I’ve noticed I do have the exact same location-based recall in full VR as I do in real life.
Thinking back, most of the main points I can recall from conversations in VR are either when I have just moved around the virtual space (so the visuals are different), or when new people come into the conversation (especially people with interesting avatars).
Interesting. I’d be interested in seeing if this works for others too.
Another idea: closing ones eyes while one talks (or voice chats), just to see how it effects memory.
Anecdotal evidence, I have heard from many people that they associate conversations with where they had them. Use the :thumbs-up: react if you also heard this.
I haven’t heard of this, but I definitely do this.
There is also some evidence of general-purpose cognitive benefits to walking. Reposting a comment below:
There have been studies on the subject, having people walk or not (and walk in varying conditions) and measuring their performance on some intellectual or creative task, and concluding that (a) walking does help and (b) the type of walk probably matters. First citation I found: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xlm-a0036577.pdf
I would be interested to see if it helps to be familiar with the space you are walking in. If not, you could for example generate a new MineCraft world for every episode of a podcast. Then name that world as the podcast name just in case.
It could possibly be more effective to travel through google maps. Doing this would lead to clearer landmarks to anchor to.
Or, there are many ambient walking/driving videos on YouTube. Would watching one of these have the same effect? I have doubts. I remember as a child watching the road as my Mother drove me to school every day. But when it came time for me to finally drive I could only vaguely get the route. A similar thing happens when I’m following someone else’s directions as I walk with them.
Ideally you would just walk. Exercise and learning at the same time is wonderful. But, you’ll exhaust the possible directions you can travel in eventually. I use my daily walking route as a mind palace to place characters in at predetermined landmarks. I then give each a corresponding number. It’s taking a while, but eventually the goal is to use this to remember stats and dates.
This is a good suggestion! I’ll plan on walking in addition to talking during my upcoming meetup.