Short Wave - What We Will ⁠— And Won't ⁠— Remember About The Pandemic

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

There's no doubt we're living through a Big Historic Event, but that doesn't necessarily mean we'll remember it all that well. Shayla Love, a senior staff writer for VICE, explains what memory research and events from the past say we will and won't remember about living through the coronavirus pandemic. Plus, why essential workers may remember this time differently from people who are staying home.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, if you are new to Shortwave, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button. That way you can start every weekday morning with us, like a little science vitamin that you swallow with your ears. Well, I don't know if that... Just go ahead and follow or subscribe. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. One of the words we keep hearing about this moment we're all living through right now is unprecedented. news, unprecedented job loss. Unprecedented illness and fatalities. An unprecedented level of transparency.

It was an unprecedented day, and I think... There's no precedence for understanding and framing this, but it is important. There's no doubt that this is a capital B big historic event. But that doesn't necessarily mean we'll actually remember it all that well. You'd think that if we knew something was important while it was happening, we'd be able to remember it more. Shayla Love is a senior staff writer for Vice and recently wrote about this. But we know from the past that that's not true, and we can learn that from asking people how they remember other really big historical events.

Scientists have done this in studies, for instance, with the September 11th attacks. For her story, Shayla talked to a person about what they remember from the London Blitz, another about the Vietnam War, and her own mom, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution. Turns out, even for unprecedented events, the picture our minds paint is far from clear. Our memories just don't work that way, right? It's not like a camera that just captures everything around us with all this accuracy. We don't remember everything and even what we do remember is often wrong. So today in the show, what memory research says we will remember and what we won't about living through the coronavirus pandemic. And why our essential workers may remember this.

time differently from people who are staying at home. I'm Maddie Safaya, and this is Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. So before we get into it, let's just talk about how memories work in general. So you talk to an expert, Danielle O'Sheiller, a neuroscientist at Icon School of Medicine in Mount Sinai in New York City, like Broadstrokes. How did she say memories kind of work? Right. So I think just living in the world, we know that we don't remember everything, right?

When we go throughout the day, our brains selectively forget and remember different things. And so like I said, it's not really like a camera that takes snapshots. It's something that can be strengthened or weakened or incorporate new information. Dr. Schiller's studies reconsolidation, which is this notion that every time you remember something, you're kind of reconstructing the memory from scratch. It's like a whole new memory. So her research is trying to interrupt that process in order to help people with PTSD. but memory is this really like active thing that's always being reconstructed and strengthened in our minds.

It's not like a photograph or like a scrapbook. Right. Yeah. Like I remember reading about like maybe you see a photo of that time and that photo can kind of alter that memory in one way or another. And this idea that we're kind of constantly updating our memories is kind of interesting and wild. Yeah. And I also think it's really interesting and also kind of scary that. our personalities influence what we remember too. So if you believe certain things about yourself,

like that you're really courageous, it might mean that you forget about that time that you were coward. Oh, that's wild. I didn't know that. And studies have found that different cultures can remember different things too. So in Chinese culture, people's memories are less personal and they focus more on historical events and that might be because of the more collectivist nature of that society versus we're very individualized. So there are all these like individual differences that can promote what you remember and what you forget. Okay, so, Shela, in general, what are the things that we are likely to remember about this time? So for each person, it'll probably be a bit individual, but I was able to talk to some experts about what things might influence what

we remember. And powerful emotions, so happy and sad, will influence whether or not we remember something. So it might be the first person that I knew who got COVID-19 or if there was a death in my family or social circle, I'm definitely going to remember that because it's an emotional experience that I'll have that's really strong. We'll also remember if anything new or surprising happens because novelty is something that we tend to remember. And so in the same way, any moments that mark a transition will be really memorable. So if we suddenly reopen New York city where I live, I'm going to remember that because it's a big transition. And another thing I thought was quite moving is that we might remember all of the things that

we weren't able to do. Oh, right. You called this the memory of absence. Yeah, exactly. So for a college student who didn't get to walk at graduation this year, that's quite memorable. And probably because it hits all those other points like powerful emotions and novelty and a moment of transition, it's just that something didn't happen, whereas normally it would have. But they'll probably remember that for the rest of their lives. Yeah, sure. Okay. So how might like what we remember and don't be different for essential workers who have been going into work while like a lot of us that are really fortunate can stay home? Did the researchers you talk to have any ideas about that? Yeah. And this is this is so important to stress, which is that for those of us who feel really stuck at home, like every day is the same. And we

don't know whether it's Tuesday or Saturday or Friday. A lot of that mind melding isn't happening for people, especially doctors and nurses and healthcare professionals who are still going in and watching the pandemic sort of on the front lines. So they're going to witness this toll on human life with their own eyes. And when you have powerful emotional experiences that can cause you to remember more things. And that's what they're just going through every single day. So they're experiencing grief and fear and anxiety and isolation. They're exhausted. And they may end up with sort of an opposite problem, which is that they remember too much or that they have PTSD

and are sort of haunted by traumatic memories that they can't get rid of. Sure, sure. So let's talk about, you know, what we can learn from previous big events. You looked at a memory study around 9-11. What was that study and what did you? learn? Yeah, this was a study from 2003 by Kathy Pezdeck. She's at Claremont Graduate University in California. And she looked at people who were college students in California and Hawaii and New York during 9-11. And she found that the people who lived in New York had the most accurate memories of

the events themselves, but they actually had worse autobiographical memory compared to those college students in other areas. And those are memories about their daily lives, sort of like what they did, what they ate for breakfast, what clothes they wore, stuff like that. So they remembered the events really well, but the things that happened about them were sort of fuzzier. And so the reason she said that that happened is that because they were in New York, the events had more emotional significance, right? If you were in California, you saw it on the news and it maybe made an impact, but you'll remember more what you were eating for breakfast that day because it's just more significant rather than it being in your city. She also found that when the...

the planes first hit the World Trade Center and people didn't really know what was going on. They had really fuzzy memories during that first 30 or 40 minutes when they couldn't construct a narrative of what was happening. And she said that it's because our memories are often used to tell a story about what's happening. And that's one of the services that our memories give us that we can look back and construct a narrative about our lives. That's really relevant to the pandemic because there's been so much uncertainty from the very beginning. At first it was just a virus that was in China. Then it came to the U.S., but it wasn't going to be that bad, right? This is stuff that we were getting from the very top from the White House.

Then we didn't have to wear masks and we didn't have to close down cities. Then suddenly everything was closed. So this lack of a cohesive narrative could be impacting our memories as well, similar to how she found in the 9-11 study just because we don't know what's going on. And so it's really hard to figure out what's important to remember and what's okay to forget. So basically, like, if we understand the narrative, if we understand what's happening in the moment that it's happening,

we're better at forming memories. But if we're still trying to get a grasp on, like, what's going on in general, our brain isn't as good as storing that information for later. Yeah, exactly. Okay, the pandemic, 9-11, two big recent events. Shayla also wanted to explore an event further back with somebody,

close to home. So my mother grew up in China during the cultural revolution and I've always been really interested about the things that she remembers and the things that she doesn't remember. So when she was born, it was during the great starvation. And so there was very little food to go around. And so I kind of assumed that because of that, she would remember a lot of what they ate. And it turns out she doesn't remember anything that she ate during that time period. and she also wasn't in school and she doesn't really remember what she did all day so she only had a couple of memories

that really stood out to her one was that when she went to sleep at night my grandmother used to guard the door to their apartment with a big steel bar because she was so scared of intruders coming in during the night and so again this this fault this hits all these categories

this is something new that her mother's never done before this is a really emotional thing it's really scary I mean how could she possibly fall asleep if your mother has to stay up all night and guard the door. So I think in these more traumatic examples, we can see, again, what types of things really stick with people and what things kind of fade away. Yeah, yeah. And there is like a way in which thinking about memory when it comes to living through this pandemic that, I don't know, feels a little bit hopeful. It means, like, that there will be a time after this. Did you, did you feel that way while you were writing it?

Yeah, I definitely did. Thinking about what we will remember implies that there will be a point in the future in which we're looking back on this. And I think that's important to remember that while you're living through something, it can feel really permanent and stretched out. And I think this is definitely going to last longer and the effects of it are going to last longer than some people hope. But there is a point in the future when we'll be past this. And sort of intentionally now trying to think about what. what we'll remember and what we'll forget, can, I think of it as a way to kind of examine what things I want to bring into the future with me as like intentionally remembering them to learn lessons from. But yeah, it's an optimistic perspective to think that one day we'll be looking back and maybe just forget a lot of this. All right, Shayla Love, I appreciate you and I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I will definitely remember this. Forever next week. I'll take next week. Okay, great. If you want to check out Shaila's full reporting on memory and the pandemic, you'll find a link in today's episode notes.

This episode was produced by Britt Hansen and edited by Viet Le. The facts were checked by Emily Vaugh. I'm Maddie Safaya. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.