Virtual Presentation for Apex Systems

Luckygirliegirl .

Apex Systems invited me to speak virtually in March 2025. The presentation is called “This Talk Won’t Change You, but How You Remember it Will” and it’s about ways I learned how to encode, store, and retrieve memories better for improving memory and brain performance. I had a psychotic break in August 2017, a couple months after my husband decided to take his own life. A few months after that, I received a late-age diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, or DID (formerly multiple personality disorder). Experiencing psychosis and not being able to participate in the reality around me like neuronormative people, I had to fight hard to regain my sanity. This talk outlines the things I did to get my brain functioning “normally” again. Although, I remind everyone at the end of the video clip below: normal is boring.

Here’s a video clip from the Apex Systems talk:

Watch the full video here: https://www.apexsystems.com/event/toolbox-talk/talk-wont-change-you-how-you-remember-it-will

To learn more about my healing journey with a late-age diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), please watch my YouTube series here.

“This Talk Won’t Change You, but How You Remember it Will” Transcript:

Erica:

So with that, let me kick it off.

Thank you all for joining us and Christina Aldan today.

Just such a pleasure to welcome you to our Apex Seminar series.

We host a couple of these every single month in an effort to educate on a wide variety of topics.

And again, memory is not one we have touched in the over 300 sessions that we’ve done over the years.

And for those that don’t know Christina, I had the pleasure of getting introduced to her at a tech conference in Denver about six months ago and was just completely wowed by the keynote session that she did.

And there’s a couple of things I want to point out about Christina’s background.

She’s been in that digital realm for going on 20 plus years.

A global speaker, she’s based in Vegas, but I imagine you’re not there very much.

She’s delivered talks, workshops worldwide, including, this is really cool, the Las Vegas Raiders.

And she does a lot for the Microsoft MVP community, which is really cool.

One of the things I really admire about you, Christina, is you are just so selfless with the knowledge that you share.

She does a lot of mentorship for different programs, won several different awards, Las Vegas Community Women and Tech Community Service Award, and Distinguished Woman of the Year Award in STEM.

And then she’s got a really significant mental health first aid coaching background.

So just so perfect for the topic today.

So with that, thank you so much, Christina.

Christina:

Thanks.

Okay, so let me just share my screen here for a second.

I think everyone should be able to, let’s see.

Can you see my, no, not yet.

Here we go, share this one.

Okay, so let me know if you can see, just drop it in the chat if you can.

Oh, good.

And sometimes my little captions don’t work, but they’re working today, hooray.

Cool, so, you know, I think that a lot of us can relate to having a really intense dream, right?

And I mean, you’re in it, you know what I mean?

Your heart’s racing, and you know the next thing is just, it’s right around the corner, and the big moment is right about to happen.

You’ve got your person in front of you, and you are mad, and you’re like, you’re ready to let them have it.

You got a finger going, right?

Maybe you got like a hand on the hip, and you’re just ready to, you’ve just never been angrier than before, and you can’t even believe it.

Suddenly, beep, beep, beep, beep, right?

Your alarm goes off.

And so that is an imprint still in your memory, and maybe you wake up, and your person’s next to you, and you’re just going, oh, good morning, darling, right?

And you’re like, oh, don’t you good morning me, you know, because you’re upset.

You have that memory.

Or how about this one?

I have four kids in my family, and so we tell stories whenever we get together, right?

My brother, my sisters, and we’ll be sitting around telling a story, and we’ll just be like, hey, remember that time when I went to the corner store, and I had my money in my hand, and we were riding the bike, and we were going, and then suddenly, it fell off the curb, and the money went scattering everywhere, and the whole family’s laughing, and then pretty soon, my brother stands up, and he’s like, wait a minute, that’s my memory.

That was me.

I was the one on the bike.

I was the one with the money, right?

Often, our memories, they drive a narrative to which we’re emotionally attached, and sometimes, these emotional attachments, they can hold us back, and when we’re stressed, we can lock into the way that we feel, and it’ll reinforce that stress.

It’ll reinforce that memory, and the deeper the memories are imprinted into our neural pathways, the deeper that emotional response is, so we’re gonna talk about that process a little bit later when we talk about long-term memory storage, but in 2018, I experienced tremendous loss, and my brain broke.

I received a late-age diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder, and it turns out that when a person dissociates all the way completely, they can have amnesia, and I had that my entire life, and I didn’t even know it.

With lots of help from highly trained professionals, I learned ways to navigate stressful triggers by processing my memories better and releasing the emotional attachments that I had to them, so I’ve learned how to change the narrative driving my emotions.

I’ve learned when my memory’s reliable, when it’s not, how it serves me, regardless of its accuracy, and so today, I wanna share some stuff that I’ve learned about improving brain performance, and as always, please take what applies and throw the rest of the weight, right, if it doesn’t apply to you, because I’m not a doctor, a neurologist, or a therapist, but I do have firsthand experience overcoming trauma, and I’m not gonna be talking about any of that today, but I’ve come to realize that the stories I tell myself and others, they can either be the chains that bind me or the keys that release me from the trauma that I aim to overcome.

My name is Christina Aldan.

I’m a brand strategy consultant based out of Las Vegas.

As Erica said, I’m a speaker, trainer, mentor, author, and I sit on the board of directors for a tech nonprofit as well as a mental health awareness foundation.

I’m a certified mental health first aid trainer.

If you wanna continue this conversation online, you can use hashtag lucky memory, and I wanna say thanks so much to Apex Systems for inviting me to speak today.

So what?

Why should we improve our memories and how our systems function?

Our memories hold the key to better communication, cultivating more emotional intelligence, being open to the viewpoints of others, and for setting healthy boundaries, and so you can see, as a brand strategy consultant who’s always looking to connect meaningful messaging with brands so that they reach their optimum clients, you can see how understanding how we encode, store, and retrieve memories would be helpful when I’m creating marketing funnels with emotional triggers, right?

So what is memory?

Memory is the faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information.

It’s something remembered from the past, a recollection, and the memory is a process, really.

It’s how we encode, store, and retrieve data from stimuli, both internal and external.

This affects our cognition.

It’s how we think about things, and it affects our behavior.

That’s our observable responses.

So our brains, they’re always monitoring our environment, right, internal, external, and they work really hard.

Our brains want to regulate our breathing, our heartbeat, our blood sugar levels, all at the same time while processing new information that’s coming in, and so these days what we know, what we call memory is really just an interconnected group of regions in our brain that are specifically related to memory subsystems, and it’s these multiple memory subsystems that are constantly processing data, and they’re able to function together, or in my case, sometimes independently of each other.

So memories are weird.

Memories can be compressed.

Our brain has this quality that when the day appears to be the same over and over and over again without a stimulus change, our brain will compress the time for efficiency.

So 2020, it just flew by for a lot of people because the days for a lot of us were repetitive, right?

So I kept saying things like, oh yeah, you know, six months ago when we were over at your place, and people were like, no, Christina, that was a year and six months ago, right?

Because our brains can compress information.

So it’s our emotions that control the narrative that we attach to a memory.

Memory is unreliable in a lot of ways because the narrative that we might attach to that memory, and so these tips, they’re gonna help you both in your work and your personal life.

So for example, if your narrative about work is keeping you stuck in victimhood, you could choose to stay stuck in that pattern, or you can learn to process that emotion in a healthy way a little bit more, a little bit more until that stress is manageable.

And, you know, maybe eventually you’re no longer feeling hopeless.

Maybe eventually you can start taking the steps to move forward without feeling victimized.

Maybe you need to learn new communication skills, or maybe you need to change your role entirely.

But while we can’t give our brains new processing power like we can for our computers, we can look for unconscious bias and inefficient processes to improve our brain’s performance.

We’re gonna see today the ways that our memories might fail us and ways to improve how our brains process data.

I’m not saying that you can forget or erase or completely heal from using these techniques, but they definitely help me neutralize difficult emotions, and I hope they help you, even if one technique applies to your situation.

So just focus on improving one technique maybe for three months, and then in the next three months focus on improving a different technique.

So today we’re gonna cover these themes.

We’re gonna talk about the types of memory systems.

We’re going to talk about biological storage.

We’re gonna talk about improving our daily performance.

Confidence, so as an example, something like improving your memory to remember people’s names will help you appear more confident and attentive to details because you want others to observe you appearing more confident, right?

Like if you’re going in for an interview or you’re a job candidate, something like that.

Also, we’re gonna talk about emotional intelligence and conflict management.

Conflict is inevitable, and we can use memories to set healthy boundaries with people who are maybe not open to respecting our boundaries.

So, you know, there are lots of different ways to deal with conflict, and there’s no one right way.

There’s an extreme over here, there’s an extreme over here, and there’s an enormous gray area in the middle.

So I try to wobble around the middle and consider as many options as possible when choosing how to respond to a situation.

Barak and Ebbinghaus both conducted research in 1984 that showed most forgetting occurs really early.

So most of our memories are formed around three to four years old, and that’s when we start developing these memory subsystems.

We have a declarative system and non-declarative system.

One system for short-term memory, for things like on-the-spot math.

We use a different memory subsystem for memorizing long-term algebraic formulas.

And so, in fact, memory consolidation, that helps us improve our long-term memories because it strengthens the synaptic connections between neurons structurally and chemically and at different time intervals.

So let’s talk about a declarative memory.

It’s your conscious memory, and it involves effort and intention.

So with effort and intention, we’re able to influence this memory subsystem.

We can use intentional techniques like mnemonics and repetition to help us process information.

Biologically, it’s the hippocampus and the frontal lobes that manage our declarative memory.

And our declarative memory system, it can be measured with explicit memory tests like coding tests and other aptitude tests.

So check this out.

We have a working memory.

This is about two to 18 seconds long, and it’s used for immediate mental calculations like math or like dialing a phone number.

This is the temporary processing place where the old information comes in and it collides with the new information.

And so biologically, our ability to take in that new information is influenced by the neurotransmitter vasopressin.

We have episodic memory.

That’s our long-term memory system where specific life events are stored, like that time Christina Aldon gave that great talk for Apex about brain performance, right?

And then semantic memories are our long-term memory where general knowledge is stored.

So that’s facts.

Two plus two equals four, right?

The capital of Nevada is Carson City.

That’s a factual account of an incident.

So remember that the memory that drives the narrative, the narrative drives our memory that we’re attached to.

So it’s one thing if I toss a ball across the room, right?

Did you see the ball?

Was it red?

It’s a factual account.

It’s another thing if I toss the ball across the room and you go, oh my gosh, Christina Aldon almost ripped my head off with that red ball and I can’t believe she did that, right?

There’s a narrative.

But with semantic memory, it lacks a narrative.

And there’s non-declarative memory.

This is your unconscious memory.

It’s the system that influences our worldview without our awareness.

So when we use our non-declarative memory, it requires no effort on our part because it’s just there, it’s implicit.

And biologically, it’s the cortical areas of our brain, the cerebellum, the basal ganglia that govern that non-declarative memory system.

It’s imperative for forming new memories.

We cannot form new memories without our non-declarative memory system.

So people who suffer from amnesia, they may have damage in their cerebellum or their basal ganglia or cortical areas.

We can prime our memory.

Priming is when different cues or triggers might cause a person to instantly recall a memory just like that without even trying, right?

So smelling a perfume or a lotion might just instantly remind you of your grandma.

That’s an example of priming.

Not liking a person because they look like your old boss who was a total jerk.

That’s an example of priming.

And sometimes a certain smell might put a trauma-informed brain right back into the memory of that person’s trauma.

We can have conditioning.

This is an example of Pavlov’s dog, right?

Most of us have heard about Pavlov’s dog where he rang the bell every time he fed his dog.

And eventually the dog learned that the sound of the bell would result in food.

So in anticipation of being fed, the dog would produce more saliva, even just from the ringing of the bell, even if he wasn’t feeding.

All he had to do is just ring the bell.

And we can condition our brain patterns as well using techniques like neuro-linguistic programming or hypnosis for conditioning.

And then there’s motor procedural memory.

And this is how we commit to a task physically by doing it over and over and over again.

You’ll hear people say muscle memory, like practicing our golf swing, right?

So when these different memory subsystems are stimulated, they start encoding, storing, and retrieving data together.

Sometimes they don’t work together.

And sometimes you might be using your semantic memory system to recall the formula, right?

You might be missing your working memory though, and it’s not engaged for some reason.

Maybe you’re stressed or you’re having a panic attack and your brain’s like, nah, we can’t have access to that memory subsystem right now.

Forget it, I’m taking a break, right?

And so you’re not gonna be able to quite comprehend how that math formula works.

You’re not gonna be able to come up with a response to somebody and it might put you in a reaction mode.

So on top of that, people will also use different senses and their memory subsystems might process or comprehend information differently.

So maybe you’re more of a visual learner when it comes to math.

Maybe you need to hear lectures because you’re more of an auditory learner when it comes to math.

Maybe you need to wear your favorite lucky hoodie, right?

Because you learn math in a more associative way.

And so you associate it with your special hoodie, shout out to Pubcom.

You associate it with your special hoodie and that’s how you learn math best because you need to feel comfortable and that’s what you associate with math.

The point is though, is that everyone does memory in a way that’s unique to them.

And so that’s 8.1 billion different ways to learn something.

And the goal is to get your specific brain to organize the information in a way that is most beneficial to you.

And I know that I’m going really fast, so don’t worry at the end, you’re gonna be able to scan a QR code and give me some feedback and download my deck.

So I just wanted to let everybody know that.

The thing about brains though, is they lie.

As I talked earlier, we have these false memories and the more rigid our beliefs are, the more distracted we are, the more our brains are gonna lie to us.

So why do our memories deceive us?

Well, there’s lots of ways that our memories can deceive us while we encode, store and retrieve data.

We’re forgetful.

We can remember false memories.

We trust our ears, but not our eyes.

There are a lot of different ways.

So for example, if you’re struggling to connect with others and really, really struggling, I’m not talking about like, oh my gosh, you know, I’m so bored, I’m sitting around, I really need to get out.

I’m talking about people who are really suffering, who feel maybe unseen or outcast.

And for whatever reason, they haven’t been able to make connections with others.

They maybe get stuck in a victim mindset.

Then maybe when thinking about their history from a victim mindset, their mind will begin to fill in any memory gaps with information that upholds this person in the role of the victim.

And so this can create false memories out of those original memories.

Our brains are totally capable of this.

Over and over again, studies show that we’re capable of isolating specific memory systems to work independently of each other.

And in extreme cases of trauma, your brain might even dissociate from the memories altogether.

And sometimes the things that we remember depends on the value that we assign to something.

So what do you value, right?

Where’s your focus?

How many of you done this before?

You go see a movie with a friend and you’re like, oh yeah, hey, Jane, that was a great movie.

You know, it was really fun.

Thanks for coming to see this movie with me.

And then three months later, you bump into Jane and you’re telling Jane about this new Beetlejuice movie that you went to see with Bob and how, you know, Jane, you should go see this movie because Bob and I, we saw Beetlejuice and we loved it.

And Jane’s gonna look at you and she’s gonna be like, yeah, no, that was me.

We went to the movie together.

You don’t remember that at all?

Like, that was me.

But what was important to you at the time was the movie, right?

And so that was where you placed your value.

And so your brain just kind of used deductive reasoning to fill in the friend spot there.

That’s how it works sometimes.

So I wanna talk about interruptions because another issue with memories is that they can be interrupted.

Interruptions will equally disrupt the storage as well.

So therefore the retrieval of that memory.

So if you’re interrupting somebody while they’re processing their thoughts, it’s gonna force that person to suddenly adapt their senses and shift their attention toward the interruption, right?

They’re a primary source of forgetting.

Interference blocks and disrupts the flow of data.

So context switching is an interruption of the flow of data, right?

And it’s worth noting that it has to be significant enough of an interruption.

So if my kid pops in and goes, hey mom, can I run to my friends?

You know, I can go, okay, yep, sure, go ahead, have fun.

It’s not a significant interruption.

Doesn’t take a lot of my brain power to turn my attention that way.

However, if they are popping in and they need me downstairs and they have to completely take me away, I do this, I do one of these, hold up just a minute.

And this works for colleagues too.

Let me finish this text.

Let me finish this email.

Let me, I just don’t wanna lose it.

I’ll be right there.

I’m on my way, right?

Because remember, like what you see is not always what you get.

When it comes to memories, what you see is not always what you get.

And it turns out eyewitness accounts, they’re really not the best evidence.

Over and over again, it’s been proven and replicated in laboratories around the world that we just can’t trust our memories because brains lie.

So how can we improve our memory?

It’s very possible.

We can improve our memory.

We can improve our capacity for learning.

We can improve how we encode, store and retrieve data.

And it’s all because of neuroplasticity.

So we used to think that the brain was a lot more limited.

What we know now is that the nervous system has this quality called neuroplasticity.

So as we stimulate new parts of our brain over and over again, these neurotransmitters, they’re inhibited or prohibited from sending signals and bringing in different senses.

So we’re bringing in memories from past experiences.

We’re stimulating our belief system associated with those memories.

It brings in stimuli from our environment and people associated with those memories.

When we stimulate that neuropathway, we strengthen the pathway, either by lots of activity with multiple stimuli.

Essentially, we’re making that connection stronger.

And this way we create neuropathways that are new in the brain.

And repetitive stimuli as well.

If you’ve heard me speak before, you’ve probably heard me say if the stimulus is strong enough or repetitive enough, it’s gonna strengthen the neuropathway.

And that’s neuroplasticity in action.

And it’s with constant practice and mindset changes over time, that’s how you grow and shift.

And the community around you will respond.

And I’m gonna teach you the tips and the techniques that I used in just a minute here.

One quick little anecdote about that is, when I was a little teeny tiny Christina crawling around my grandma’s floor, there I was, you know, those little hairpins, I guess I don’t have one around here, but those little hairpins, metal hairpins, are right about the right size for a 110-volt socket.

And there I was crawling around my grandma’s floor, picked one up and zzzzt, whoo.

How many times do you think that I stimulated that neuropathway?

Once.

Once, that’s all I needed in my life.

I went crying to my mom.

I was like, oh, it bit me.

It bit me.

It bit me, right?

And it was because I stimulated that neuropathway and the signal was strong enough, the pain was strong enough, that I remembered it.

But you also have to remember that our brains are always moving toward efficiency.

So neuroplasticity exists for forgetting memories too.

And as my French teacher used to say, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

And that’s probably the only reason why these days, the only thing that I can say in French is, est-ce que tu un cravat?

Are you a tie?

Makes no sense whatsoever.

But that’s what I remember because I don’t use it.

So if you’re not stimulating these neuropathways, then those memories are gonna disappear because the brain is always optimizing for efficiency.

And it’s always trying to improve performance.

So real quickly, let’s talk about how we process our memories.

We have shallow processing, and that examines more of a physical features of an object as instead of the meaning behind it.

And then some things, they require more elaborate processing or deeper processing.

And that considers the meaningfulness, the purpose behind something.

So more elaborate connections and associations and chunking with existing knowledge, that’s how we use deep processing.

And there are a lot of ways to encode, store, and retrieve our memories.

And that means also that extroverts are going to respond well to stimuli that’s very assertive and very face-to-face, right?

Introverts might reject the data altogether if it’s experienced too aggressively or in your face.

And so take a look at this tweet right here.

Dev Nakima posted on Twitter.

They had some tips for companies who are looking to engage with people learning different styles.

So here’s some valuable tips and points of advice for companies to give voices for those who are maybe introverts and they process information differently.

First of all, front load the data.

Front load me with information and give me time to process and respond.

I’m not an on-the-spot thinker, but give me time to be thoughtful and it’s worth the wait, right?

Give me reference material.

Make asynchronous collaboration possible.

My brain is not always lit up and ready for output.

Allow me to communicate in text.

And real-time meetings are a lot to process at once and I’m short on working memory.

And I’m probably bored and it’s taking everything I have just to stay focused and listen for understanding.

So this is especially true during COVID times.

So she was nice enough to let me share this.

I loved these tips so much and it’s a really good information for companies who are trying to be inclusive and hear multiple voices when they’re in meetings instead of the loudest voices.

So here’s a summary of that.

Understanding this really helps support everyone on the team.

It’s not that everyone incorporates the same processes and how they store and retrieve their memory.

So remember, I’m not a doctor, I’m not a counselor.

So if you have any major concerns or serious challenges, you should definitely consult a professional and not a public speaker or software brand strategy consultant.

I have lots of anecdotal stories and emotional resilience coaching skills, but I’m in no way a mental health professional.

So let’s talk about encoding memories.

So when we encode our memories, like I said earlier, what we focus our attention on, that’s really gonna make the difference.

Is it fear?

Is it fun?

Is it what makes us happy?

You can train your brain to seek out and recognize patterns.

So you might decide to count how many times a day you recognize someone making a happy memory.

Maybe try to count one more than you did the day before.

And if you can’t find anyone making happy memories, then maybe you need to go out and create your own happy memories.

Start counting moments of gratitude, or even if they’re small little moments of peace and appreciation.

So you could feel maybe the sun on your face, or you can pause just to become aware of your environment.

Another thing that we can do is take a slow and low, oh, I always tell people, take an inhale, and exhale.

These small intentional changes are how big changes are made.

And I believe that many of us have the power to change that narrative.

We can tell ourselves, you know, I’m just gonna pause and take a breath, just examine my surroundings.

And through this, we can create our own opportunities.

We can create our own luck.

So here are some techniques that I’ve learned and used, and I hope that even if you try one, it helps improve your communication, the results that you get from your team, your relationships with your boss, yourself.

It’s totally worth it for me to share these if it helps even one person.

So here’s a really neat technique.

I struggle with this one because it stresses my working memory.

And if I push too hard, it kind of triggers a panic attack.

So this is the card memory technique, and it’s a way to encode data better.

You shuffle a deck of cards, and then you look at them and you try to remember their order.

Takes a while, but eventually you get it.

And the result is that you teach your brain how to encode data faster, and it improves your short-term memory.

So we can use a memory game to practice training your brain.

For example, you could pick out the memory cards that have a white background, or you could try to recall only the red cards.

We can improve encoding through action because action boosts episodic memory by encoding and releasing more noradrenaline hormone.

So if you have a wiggly kid like I do, right, you can have them study while they wiggle.

We got a wobble cushion.

And in this way, you can see how experiential active learning is a more effective teaching strategy for a lot of different learners, especially for kids that are wiggly, right?

And in fact, there is a study out there where they had college students study, and they had them study without drinking, and then they had them get drunk and take an exam, right?

And the drunken students, they failed.

So they got the students drunk again, and this time they studied while they’ve been drinking, and they remembered the content that they’d studied.

So the memory stayed.

The lessons were imprinted into their nervous system, and therefore, their memory subsystems held it.

The other thing to improve encoding is something that I learned on TikTok.

This one is called Shoot the Thumb, and let me see if I can…

Okay, so Shoot the Thumb helps you encode memories better because it forces neural pathways to be activated and the memory subsystems to work together.

So they’re gonna be encoded easier since the neural pathways are transmitting more input data.

So Shoot the Thumb, here we go.

We have bilateral stimulation of both hemispheres, and that’s how it improves memory encoding because the right and the left motor functions are activated while you’re holding onto that memory.

So you follow your eyes, and you shoot your thumb, and your eyes follow your thumb every time you do it.

Ooh, look at this.

I’m doing it better than normal.

Usually it takes me a little while.

So that’s the Shoot the Thumb technique, and that helps for encoding information.

Here’s another one.

It’s called the Spacing Effect, and this improves your memory encoding because of the repetition over time.

And I use this method to improve brain performance for Ignite Talks, or even for my PubConf talks because they’re fast.

They’re only five minutes, and so you’ve got to really remember them.

So the first step is you write the talk.

Then step two, you read it out loud.

You see, you hear, you feel your vocal cords resonating.

Then you look away, do something else, and then you come back and you repeat your talk.

And then after about six to eight hours, you do it again.

And then before you go to bed, you do it again.

And this takes advantage of that memory consolidation technique when we sleep that I mentioned earlier.

And then when you wake up, you repeat it again, and you’re going to remember your Ignite Talk.

We can improve encoding by relaxing.

This allows the neurotransmitter vasopressin to be released, and it makes us more open to receiving information.

So remember earlier when I was like, oh, slow and low, oh, right?

When you take a relaxing breath, you can have a relaxed mind, and we’re a lot less likely to have our amygdala hijack our brain and shut off that signal to our prefrontal cortex and our higher executive functions.

Because if those emotions are strong enough, our experience gets stuck in our limbic brain and our lizard brain.

And then we just end up repeating the same patterns until we can process it up through our midbrain to our prefrontal cortex.

That’s where those executive functions are.

And then we can actually analyze the experience and put it in the sequence of events in proper order.

So remember, it’s with small intentional changes that these big changes are made.

And I believe that many of us have the power to change that narrative we tell ourselves.

And when we take the time to examine, we can really improve our brain’s performance.

So here is a rundown of ways to improve encoding.

And then I wanna talk about storing memories.

So everyone has a song that brings them back to that moment, right?

The Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction brings me right back to high school whenever I hear it, because our senses help us remember things, right?

We recruit multiple senses to make memories more concrete and to imprint them into our nervous system.

So adding multiple forms of stimuli will encourage a stronger connection to the memory.

And that way we can retrieve things for easier later.

So this creates a stronger imprint by activating all the different parts of your brain.

And it’s important to note that if our prefrontal cortex gets more than five sensory inputs, our ability to predict the model of what comes next actually shuts us down.

So in marketing, we call that a confused mind says no.

But we have a lot of different senses.

We have sight, sound, smell, touch, taste.

We have a sense of time, a sense of hunger.

We have a sense of blushing when we get flushed, right?

We have a sense of our agency and ourselves.

But remember, brains lie.

So in the case of our sight, if a shadow is added, you can really trick our brain into seeing the motion differently.

So it’s easy to trick our brains and manipulate our senses.

That’s why it’s best to incorporate multiple sensory inputs when we’re trying to store information.

And humans, we love telling stories.

I’m from the Upper Peninsula, Michigan, and I grew up with my uncles and aunts telling the grandest stories about the big fish they caught, right?

And the legendary tales of the fish.

And somehow the fish always got a little bit bigger each time the story was told, right?

Because our memory is strengthened by story.

And that narrative, it helps us remember details and retain the lesson.

So, you know, you can ask yourself, is this thought helpful to my joy?

And is it helpful to support my new story?

If you think something and you’re feeling bad, then take it to a deeper level and process on the meaning and the purpose behind it.

Why are you thinking that thought?

What benefit does it give you?

I’m sure at one point it was helpful, but it’s served its purpose.

And at this point, you know, maybe you can move on.

And maybe you can choose to think a different thought or change the story that you’re telling yourself instead of maybe ruminating on past scenarios that have already been worked out and they really no longer serve you.

When we think about storage, it’s our hippocampus that retains and stores data.

So remember, we only have two to 18 seconds to allow the hippocampus to begin storing memories when our short-term memory, when that old information collides with the new information.

And if we want a memory to be processed permanently, we’re going to have to activate our other memory subsystems.

We used to think our brains worked as left brain and right brain, not true.

Our brains store data in chunks.

And so we activate multiple parts of both hemispheres of our brain.

So that’s why we chunk up phone numbers, right?

Has anybody done this before where you’re like, okay, yeah, sure, go ahead.

Give me your phone number.

All right, great.

They get out your pen and you get your paper and you’re like, okay, go ahead.

And they go, okay, yeah, are you ready?

Yep, I’m ready.

Okay, good.

It’s 70-25-551-212, what?

Wait, no, no, no.

What’s your number?

It’s 70-235-1212.

No, just give it to me like a human.

Everyone knows how a telephone number is in cadence, right?

It’s 702-555-1212.

Like, just give it to me not like a psychopath, please.

It’s the cadence, it’s the tone, it’s the seven digits because we like chunks.

We love to chunk up data and it helps us remember things better.

We can also improve storage in certain influencing factors.

So if we know that we can sit and meditate for five minutes, maybe you start with three minutes, maybe you work up to 20 minutes, even just eight weeks of meditation for people who’ve never even meditated before, it changes the performance of your brain.

Biologically, we can see this on tests.

It’s been repeated over and over again.

You get thickening in several regions of the brain which involve learning, memory, empathy, and regulating your emotions.

Also, your feelings influence how we store memory.

Emotions help us remember.

So an emotional response, however negative or positive, it’s gonna be enough to inhibit the neurotransmitters that activate parts of our brain and it’s gonna tell us how to store the information.

So if you have a visceral reaction to something, like if you think about a can of worms with just oozing worms at the top and they’re all wiggly and slimy and gross, well, you might retain that memory over the same scene even without seeing a can of worms.

And so taken to the extreme, if you’re even too emotional, you might even find yourself empathizing too much with another person.

You might feel weighed down by their heaviness because maybe your own psychological boundaries are not stable and firm, right?

So that’s important.

Another one I talked about earlier, if you’re experiencing multiple stimuli at once, you have a greater chance of remembering.

So another tip is to attach that memory to something that you already know, attach it to something you’re already retaining, like doing your math homework and taking exams in your favorite hoodie because it’s comfortable and you wear it all the time.

It’s an emotional association of comfort.

And so it’s gonna strengthen that connection.

Here’s one, create chaos, be unpredictable, break habits that aren’t serving you anymore.

And sometimes we can imprint our memory with so much information, we might be on autopilot.

You know what I’m talking about, right?

Where we’ve stored the memory, how we’ve organized it in our brain, how we recover that information, it just becomes habit, right?

So I’m here to encourage you to be a little bit more unpredictable, take a new route home or experience the joy of the holiday decorations or a different view of your community.

Bring awareness to your movements and why you’re choosing that route.

You can also use repetition.

Use repetition if you wanna adopt a memory and strengthen those neuropathways.

In marketing and advertising, it’s been estimated that a person needs to see something 21 times before it sinks in.

And I mean, 21 times exactly the same.

So imagine how beneficial or harmful this could be when people are exposed to the same messaging over and over and over again.

They’re gonna begin to believe that it’s true.

This is how a lot of marketing and advertising and propaganda stuff kind of works because it’s that repetition over and over and over again.

We can also use better documentation, especially in tech to help us understand why choices are made, why decisions are made, not just the what, but the why and why we didn’t make certain decisions.

So when we add purpose into the documentation, it brings value to the context of the project.

So when somebody is deciphering it, two, three, four years later from now, and they wanna migrate the project into .

NET Core or they want to run an advertising marketing campaign, it’s helpful to look at why they didn’t do it in the past.

Maybe before it was because we didn’t have the staffing, we didn’t have the budget, we didn’t have the time.

Now we do have those things.

So maybe we can make a different choice now.

And I also wanna talk about what you value.

What we value is what we remember.

So whatever you’re focusing on is what you remember.

So how does this play out in the workplace?

If you’re a manager, you’re an employee that has a great idea in a meeting and that idea inspired you, you might not remember who to credit for that idea, right?

You were more focused on the idea than the value of the person who brought the idea to you.

So if you commit to a consistent documentation process when you’re facilitating meetings, this is gonna help train your brain to focus on the who, as well as the what, and then it supports better communication for those people who are asynchronously looking at the last meeting notes too.

And one last thing before we move on to how we retrieve memories.

One more thing about storage.

We can improve our memory storage while thinking about the von Restorff effect.

And so it tells us that things that uniquely stand out are gonna be remembered most.

So I once worked for a hotel for a summer at the front desk, and it was like in between, I think it was my first or second year in college or something, and we had an officer there with his canine partner, his dog, and they lived in the hotel and we’d chat and whatever.

And one day, one of the other officers came in and we were all just standing there talking, and they were talking about how the one police officer, he pulls over red cars more because they were the easiest for him to spot.

Now, this was before radar.

So, you know, I’m dating myself, but this is before we had those lower radars, but he could always spot the red cars that were speeding more.

And the other police officer said it was white cars that he remembered.

And really, it just depends on what the focus is.

One focused more on red cars, one focused more on white cars.

Of course, these days we have lasers.

So here are the ways that we can improve memory storage.

And remember, I’m gonna give you a QR code so you can give me feedback and you can download my slide deck afterward.

The last part I wanna talk about is retrieving memories.

So in 1983, Tolving proposed that forgetting was not just a matter of availability, but an inability to go and retrieve those memories that are still inside your long-term memory.

So for example, this is like when you have that actor’s name, it’s right on the tip of your tongue, right?

We’ve all done this before.

He was the guy in the movie with the head, the two arms, you know, he had the face with that girl, right?

It’s right there on the tip of my tongue.

He was on that show.

And in this case, we can help prevent losing access to those memories by associating them with different existing memories.

So another example is like when you walk into your bedroom and you completely forgot why you went in there, right?

You can prime your memory, your non-declarative memory subsystem by giving your brain a cue to retrieve those memories, right?

We retrace our steps, we backtrack, that’s what we do.

We go back, what did we think?

How is it?

Okay, all right.

Okay, now I remember.

And that’s how we can retrieve our memories.

We can improve our memory retrieval by using the same method every time.

So different cues help us retrieve our memories.

We should note that the same two people are gonna use different cues for remembering the same task.

So again, remember there’s 8.1 billion different ways to learn, to remember.

And the goal is to figure out what works best for you so you have optimum performance.

Your mood, your other biases in the moment, they’re gonna influence the information you recall as well.

So if you wanna improve your memory retrieval, consider the mindset you’re in at that moment.

Are you relaxed?

Are you open to receiving new information?

Are you angry?

You’re not taking any new input, right?

Remember there are four kids in my family.

And so when my mom was angry, she used to be like, Sarah, Jess, Mike, Chris, you know who you are, get over here, right?

Every now and then she’d even like throw in the dog’s name or the cat’s name once in a while.

So it’s our emotions that influence our memory retrieval at a biological and physiological level.

And we all are affected by this, all of us.

We can recall information with intention and we can try to teach it to someone else.

So this identifies the gaps in what we learned when we’re trying to teach it to somebody else, right?

We teach best what we need to learn.

So consider the information and how it might be applied to your work.

This is also gonna help us imprint it into our long-term memory subsystem.

So things like flashcards, practice quizzes, writing prompts for authors, these are things that are all helpful because they improve the brain’s ability to retrieve information and therefore our learning.

And it’s a slower process, but it helps with our long-term learning.

Unsurprisingly, sleep, discomfort, stress, all of these things, they influence our memory retrieval.

So we need sleep to associate, to assimilate and to integrate our learning.

Sleep after learning something on the first night or even on the third night, we still need sleep to lock in those memories into place.

So the other thing you should know is that alcohol can hinder our learning capacity by 30 to 50% if we’re not sleeping well, because with alcohol, it activates our brain after about three hours.

So that’s why sometimes if you have been drinking and go to sleep, you wake up again after about three hours.

So, you know, sleeping is really gonna help you.

Bringing down that stress level is really gonna help you to remember things and to learn.

So even proactively napping for 15 minutes, that will help you remember things as well.

The other thing to keep in mind is that memories can be malleable.

So it’s important to bring your own observation skills to the table.

There are places in your life where you’ve become complacent and you’re just doing things out of habit.

Maybe you stop questioning why you do a thing.

Maybe it’s just time to sharpen the edges of your foggy mind and get really clear on certain memories, stories, and really even the legacy that you wanna leave behind.

So those are the ways that we can improve our retrieval of memories.

So lastly, before I start taking questions here, I just want you to know and think about this as you go through the rest of your day.

Think about these questions.

Think about what are you remembering from the interactions you’re having?

Is there a pattern of things that you notice?

Are you sticking with certain topics?

Are you avoiding certain topics?

Why might that be, right?

Compare your notes with someone else.

Notice the emphasis or the de-emphasis that they focused on during various moments during a meeting, right?

And this is gonna highlight what you found valuable versus what they found valuable and what they got out of the meeting, what they learned.

Think about what type of superficial, physical details you remember.

What kind of surface processing did you do?

What kind of deep processing do you do?

What kind of meaningful, purposeful moments do you remember?

And then the last question is what distractions occurred?

Because in today’s distracted environment, I certainly often struggle to focus and to create and produce, right?

So you’d be really wise to cut out as many interferences as possible to help you remember stuff from your day.

Memory can be a really, really tricky thing.

And if nothing else, I’d like you all to remember this.

Here’s the great big secret that everybody’s so worried about finding out, right?

We all Google the things, we all forget.

And as we learned today, memories are constantly being formed, reformed, erased, and sometimes falsely they’re recorded and remembered.

I still have to use the Googles to look up things in Photoshop or InDesign, Illustrator all the time.

And I’ve been using these programs for nearly 20 years.

So you don’t have to memorize all the things.

Having the ability to think creatively through a solution, that’s really where our strength lies.

Each of us puts our own unique creative way of approaching a solution to a client’s problem.

So it doesn’t matter if you have to use the Googles to look up how to do the functions, right?

And so having these coding tests that only test one memory subsystem during interviews, it’s just not effective.

And so when we’re delivering these tests to new hires, we got to ask ourselves if we’re testing their sometimes faulty memories, or are we testing their creative problem-solving skills in how they’re applying the tools?

I don’t think we should be hiring people based on their ability to just memorize code.

And we need to test their overall performance.

How are they able to collaborate with others in a way that fosters excellence, efficiency, and pride in their work?

How are they able to build products and services that empathize with their audience, right?

And the same goes for our children.

I believe that instead of teaching our kids to improve the capacity of their memorizing rules and following orders without questioning, we’ve got to encourage them to play and work in ways that foster creative problem-solving with excellence and efficiency and pride in their work.

And when we force children to just follow the rules, it stifles their creativity, and they lose the ability to make informed choices.

So today, as I stand in front of you, I encourage all of you, job seekers, hiring managers, parents, I even want to appeal to the little inner child in all of us, how well we remember something is not what defines our intellect.

How we apply that information is truly what matters with healthy boundaries, with empathy, with creativity, with collaboration, we all grow together.

Thank you very much.

And one more thing, I did promise, I have that survey for you.

So you can have my slide deck right here if you want to scan this QR code.

It takes two minutes.

It does ask for your email.

And I do not have, I don’t think it’s a required thing, but also I’ve only sent out two email newsletters in the last three years.

So you don’t have to worry about me spamming your email.

And then the last question I do have, I wanted to test your memory.

How many of you remember if I was wearing a sweater at the beginning of the presentation or glasses or a ponytail or a scarf?

I completely changed how I look subtly, but it depends on what we focus on.

And so if a lot of people are focusing on certain things, we’re not going to notice that the paintings are changed in the background.

Anyway, thank you so much, everybody.

I’m going to put this slide back so you can click the QR code.

You can download it.

And I have seven more minutes, I guess, and I can answer questions.

Well, it’s so funny.

I knew she was doing it, Jessica.

And I also didn’t, there were some things.

It’s like a where’s Waldo moment.

Thanks, good.

So I didn’t read anybody’s, I had to go really, really fast.

So I’m sorry, I didn’t read any of the comments or questions.

So if you want to ask them now, I’m paying attention.

Oh, thanks, I’m glad you enjoyed the presentation.

Great, good, good, good.

Yeah.

Anybody has any questions?

Yeah, I see one question.

And then someone said, I’m so happy to hear I’m not alone in my experiences.

No, you are definitely not alone.

I’m in a lot of these buckets too.

So going back to the shoot the thumb method, are you trying to learn something other than just focusing on that physical exercise or?

When you do shoot the thumb, the goal is to hold a memory, something in your mind while you do it.

Because what that does is that memory then is gonna bring in bilateral stimulation.

You’re using your eyes, you’re using physical back and forth across left and right, and the coordination.

Can I do it?

Yeah, I can do it.

I can do it.

So if I wanted to remember something like my daughter’s besties birthdays today, and I could go, okay, her birthday is March 21st, and I can do this March 21st.

That’s when her birthday is.

It’s March 21st, her birthday is March 21st.

And then I keep doing this for a little while for about five minutes, and that helps stimulate all the neural pathways.

We’re talking about multiple senses, multiple memory subsystems, and that’s how we can really improve how we encode, store, and retrieve data.

Wow.

Yeah.

Is there a place where people can go to look up some more exercises?

I’ve never heard, I don’t know about anybody else, but I’ve never heard of any of your exercises.

So one, I follow somebody on TikTok.

That’s how I found the shoot the thumb one specifically.

And she on TikTok is, well, I’m gonna give everybody, if you didn’t get the deck, I can send it to you again, so you can email it to everybody, Erica.

Let’s see the shoot the thumb.

She’s a TikToker, and she is an ADHD specialist, and it’s called ADHD, here it is.

She’s ADHD reading on TikTok.

But I have a lot of resources too that I use for my research for this talk.

So there are certain things, like I do a workshop about memory palace, and I teach everybody how to create a memory palace, like Sherlock Holmes.

And there are a lot of different books out there that people can read to help improve their memory for tips and tricks.

Especially the one about the cards, help us encode data better.

That’s a really good one as well.

And there was a magic, a magician, I read his book.

And this was a guy who didn’t even graduate from high school.

He had like a seventh grade education, I think, something like that.

But he moved on to be a very successful businessman and a multimillionaire, because he learned how to remember things, and he learned how to learn quickly, yeah.

I have a book right now from the library that I need to go pick up too, and it’s something about, that one is called, let’s see, I can tell you right now.

It’s about memory and how we, here it is, The Science of Rapid Skill Acquisition, and that’s Peter Hollins.

I love Peter Hollins.

He’s such a fantastic neuroscientist, really science-based, factual-based.

He’s a clinical researcher and he’s great.

That’s cool.

Have you heard of the Justin Willman, the magic for humans guy?

He’s got a Netflix show.

Oh no, I haven’t.

He was in Tampa a few weeks ago, and one of my best friends is obsessed with him, so we went, and he knew, I think he must’ve done what you did.

He asked people their zip code in the audience, and then he could tell you what city everyone was from, and it was across the country, and we all thought he was cheating, and he must’ve just done some of this education.

It’s wild, it’s wild.

Yeah, you can really train your brain.

I talked to a friend the other day, and they were like, oh yeah, I memorized a deck of cards.

I could tell you.

I was like, wow, that causes me a panic attack when I try to do it, but I mean, I’ve practiced it, but never to that level.

Yeah, I doubt I could do the alphabet backwards.

But all of these things, after I really experienced severe brain fog and grief, and then COVID happened, I lost so much capacity for processing.

I mean, marketing funnels, I couldn’t put together marketing funnels for three, four years.

It was really hard for me.

And these are the exact techniques that I use to bring my brain back up to speed, to get all of my neuropathways firing again, and to just be able to function normally again.

Yeah.

Normally.

Yeah.

Yeah, seriously.

I’m not seeing any other questions.

I mean, any other recommendations anywhere else you would direct people?

Maybe you’ll start putting out more than two newsletters every three years?

Yeah, right?

I know.

I am actually just about to put up my YouTube channel.

I recorded a series of six interviews that are about an hour long each, and they talk about my journey in healing my brain directly from the psychosis that I experienced all the way up until last month, and the six and a half year journey that I came through coming out of that trauma and coming out of that.

So that’s on my YouTube channel.

I’m lucky girly girl everywhere on the interwebs.

And then I do have a book out about emotional resilience.

It’s called Mastering Resilience Lessons Learned.

And it’s a lot of this stuff and other tips as well.

And I’m writing a memoir if ever that gets released.

I don’t know if that’ll get released.

Well, good luck on that.

Well, thank you.

This was, I mean, fascinating.

So really appreciate you doing this for our community.

And thank you all for tuning in and being such an engaged crowd.

That always helps and does wonders.

So with that, have a lovely rest of your day.

And thank you again, Christina.

Bye.