Learn Tactical Insights on Memory

Can you remember what you ate for breakfast yesterday? How about what you ate for breakfast last Tuesday? Or how about your breakfast on July 1st, 2007? It’s a tough one.

But if you asked Bob Petrella, you’d be amazed. Bob’s rare condition—Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM)—enables him to remember every single breakfast he’s eaten for the past 40 years.

Clearly, memory doesn’t typically work like this. For the rest of us, memory isn’t a faithful replay of all previous experiences, but a suggestible, re-creative process. What this means is that there’s no straightforward path between experience and later recollection. Our brain isn’t optimizing for accuracy.

What does this mean for marketing? The better you can understand the nature of memory, the better you can design experiences that leave the strongest, more enduring impressions.

Memory is complex, but harnessing its insights doesn’t have to be.