[Music] and finally in local news a Bay Area woman is making an attempt at a new world record she'll try to recite pi to more than 68,000 decimal places if you can believe it the current record of 67,8 190 is held by L Chow of China he's held the record since 2005 we go live now to the attempt 3. 14159 26535 8979 32 3846 it's amazing what some people are able to remember there are memory Champions who can tell you on what day of the week your birthday will occur 75 years from now or can instantly recall obscure Sports statistics there are people who can call up Vivid details of experiences they had years ago as if they were happening now these memory superheroes can make the rest of us look bad when we forget to pick up milk on the way home from work but beyond the spectacle and Novelty of extreme memorization lies some interesting Concepts around the significance of remembering and forgetting in our day-to-day lives in this episode you'll hear about a topic I find so fascinating that I devoted a chapter of my new book how to change to its ins and outs that's because forgetting is a surprisingly common problem that can have bigger consequences than most of us appreciate today you'll hear about some incredibly brave souls who honed their memory skills in order to avoid detection and capture in the world of Espionage and you'll learn how you can leverage certain mental quirks to remember better from guests Todd Rogers and Angela [Music] Duckworth I'm Dr Katie Milkman and this is choiceology an original podcast from Charles Schwab it's a show about the psychology and econom ICS behind our decisions we bring you true stories involving high stakes moments and then we explore the latest research and Behavioral Science to help you make better judgments and avoid costly [Music] mistakes when you think about forgetting you probably conjure up a situation of relatively minor consequence maybe you think of the dry cleaning you forgot to pick up which was surely still at the shop the next week or that dentist appointment you missed which you were probably able to rebook easily but for undercover agents in World War II forgetting seemingly Minor Details could be a matter of life and death hi I'm Sarah Lise Miller I am a doctorial candidate at the department of War studies in Kings College London Sarah Louise studies the brave women who risked their lives to gather and transmit intelligence during the second world war we've asked her to tell us about one of them Elizabeth Reynolds so Elizabeth Reynolds is an extremely colorful character she was born in New York her mother was English so she was educated in Europe and was sent to an English public school she was in France when World War II broke out and she actually joined the American Hospital ambulance Corps as a driver and she was peripherally engaged in vaguely anti-german activities at that point Germany occupied France in 1942 organized resistance in France was no longer possible the government faced two Alternatives retire to North Elizabeth's family was sent to an internment camp but Elizabeth narrowly escaped by burying her American passport and fleeing to unoccupied France in November 1942 she crossed France zigzagging across France to reach the Swiss border the Swiss um actually saw her and thought this is someone we can use she's very gutsy very intelligent the British Consulate also recognized her success in evasion tactics and in the summer of 1943 she enlisted as a courier with the British Special Operations executive or S soe the S soe was a secret organization that helped resistance movements in German occupied countries France being one of the most important s soe's f section specifically existed to Aid The Liberation of France by assisting the French Resistance via Guerilla Warfare and Churchill actually Rec called it his ministry of ungentlemanly warfare Elizabeth was one of the 39 female recruits in the S soe all of whom spoke Flawless French it was extremely perilous work the Germans were offering huge rewards to French people to hand over the names and the locations of SE soe Personnel so you were taking your life in your hands every day it was not for the faint of heart before being deployed s soe agents were told they had less than a 50% chance of avoiding detection and capture they were under no Illusions and they knew that if they were caught it was impossible to get them home it was impossible to do anything about it so it would mean certain imprisonment most likely torture and execution and for some of them that was the case as a courier Elizabeth IED messages to key Allied Personnel in her circuit in France often on foot or by bicycle Elizabeth was a great great risk both to herself and her circuit and in turn the British work in sabotage if she were to be caught with any information on her that indicated she was working for the soe some careers wrote messages down on slips of paper and hid them in their shoes but not Elizabeth Elizabeth quite famously refused to commit anything to paper she was a very clever woman she did not do the slips of paper in the shoes thing with information on uh cuz she just thought it was too dangerous so she actually managed to remember and recite verbatim messages that she needed to hand over so uh details including names locations all sorts she just made sure she memorized them she played a crew role in The Escape lines it was obviously useful to get as many refugees and down pilots and stuff out of France as possible cuz they could all be debriefed for information it was so hard to get intelligence from inside occupied territories so the information that people who had been in France for a while could give the British authorities was actually quite valuable Elizabeth managed to work undetected for some time she probably should have packed up a bit before she did her network leader was actually quite concerned that she was beginning to stick out she was apparently very tall and quite English looking and he thought that she stuck out a bit uh and that made her a risk to herself so he actually arranged for her to go back to England on the way to her pickup site she passed through Paris and she decided to visit a friend at a safe house in Paris and unfortunately someone had tipped off the Germans that she was going to do that and she and the safe house owner were promptly arrested as soon as she arrived after being betrayed she and her friend were both taken to prison and left overnight in a Cell together which is quite unusual they were normally split up during the night that they were left alone together in a Cell they made up a story that they were going to both stick to and you see this in cop dramas all the time you split up the two suspects and see if their stories are different because even the minutest detail is different gives away that they've made it up so they went over and over and over it all night the story was that she was a US citizen but she' missed Paris so much that she decided to come back and live there under the radar so they made up this story committed the details to memory and pretty much awaited interrogation that they knew was coming they were put into solitary confinement for a bit before they were interrogated so you can imagine them sat there just going over and over these details trying to remember as much as possible to [Music] match it's excruciating to imagine the Fate that awaited them but if they could anticipate what they would be asked and each remember precisely all of the details they had concocted they might have a chance when she was finally interrogated both Elizabeth and her friend gave their cover story that they had come up with and the Germans believed them completely and never linked her or her friend to the soe Elizabeth was spared possible torture and execution and actually released from prison a very unusual fate for captured s soe agents she wasn't out of the woods yet but she was still alive she was sent to the vatel internment camp where she stayed until France was liberated in 1944 she stayed in France and returned to civilian life working in advertising she was awarded the Legion of Honor and the quad by France and eventually recalled her remarkable career in her book full moon to France Elizabeth Reynolds and other soe agents like her were incredibly Brave quick-witted patriotic and resourceful but another another thing that made them great agents was their ability to remember key information so how did agents memorize messages and deliver them sometimes verbatim how did they manage to do that and memorize all the other things crucial to their missions Morse code Security check numbers cover stories code names and countless other details the soe training records are limited but we spoke with Warren Reed a former Australian secret intelligence service officer who shed some light on some memorization techniques important to spycraft my name is Warren Reed I uh live in Sydney in Australia I was recruited into the Australian secret intelligence service and uh was trained for 6 months by MI6 in London and then served in Asia in the Middle East Warren explains how during his early training in the UK he learned memory techniques based on Association I was in London sitting with a dozen or others and the um Services psychologist came in who did memory training he was quite a fearsome character and he came in and we had no idea what was on that day so he comes in and we're all sitting in a semicircle and he just points to one Chap and said um 16 green lemons we thought God what's this about and then he pointed to someone else and said 36 Marone Street sw1 and then may be a bank card number or he thought oh God this must be Memory training so he ran through 10 things and none of us could get all 10 and then he slapped his forehead and he said oh my God where the hell does MI6 get this human material from these days to Dish up dullards like this to me it was a harsh introduction but Warren's trainer would go on to teach them a memorization technique that was essential to success in the field a better system to use is either the house or apartment you're living in now or if you've moved around a lot use the childhood home you grew up in that you know really well and uh when I said 16 green lemons you could come up the front path to the front door and in a string bag or something someone has hung a bag with um 16 green lemons in it you know they're lemons they're not limes or anything like that and they put their hand in a big tin of green paint bright green paint and they've DED the the numerals 1 1616 on the door and I remember him saying the more graphic you are and placing the thing you need to remember there the more it will stick in your mind so he said uh I'll give you all now 2 or 3 minutes to work out to Circuit through your childhood home and then I'll give you 25 things and I expect no one will make a mistake and um we all did that and then we did the 25 no one made a mistake then we all went up to 50 and then over the next few days and weeks some of us could actually remember the things we' done a week or two before we tried to do that and we could and some of us went up over a hundred just to see what we could do so once you start using it your whole life becomes imbued with [Music] this this technique of picturing things you want to remember in your home or a familiar place is commonly called using a Memory Palace or the method of locai it's a strategy of memory enhancement which leans on the power of visualization to enhance the recall of information evidence shows that using this tactic to memorize a 12 item shopping list doubles the number number of people who can remember at least 11 of 12 items and from Warren's experience in the field in the 1970s and 80s the technique was indispensable much like the soe spies in World War II memorization was crucial in maintaining cover if you're working under cover you need uh a very solid memory backup so that when you're playing a cover role you play only that role and don't accidentally um slip back into your spy mode and if you're using a false identity where you have totally different papers and documents or license a passport whatnot with a totally different name a different background and everything possibly a different nationality different native language all of those the details of that false Persona have to be remembered to such a degree that they become instinctive if you take notes and the local security service is watching you then they have all the evidence they need to put you in prison declare your persona nrer and kick you out or Tor you and get a lot of information and then kill you so you can't take notes so it's it's the need to block remember vast amounts of information I mean a favorite trick of the security service if you're using a false identity would be to call out your real name if they knew it and so someone calls it out you don't instinctively look around because you're not in that Persona so you know me memory just runs through everything you do Warren Reed is a former agent of the Australian secret intelligence service and the author of several spy novels including his latest an elephant on your nose Sarah Louise Miller is a doctoral candidate at the department of War studies at Kings College London I have links to more information about Warren and Sarah Louise in the show notes and at schwab.com [Music] podcast forgetting crucial details in the world of Espionage can be deadly but forgetting can also have a big impact on many aspects of civilian life a single Mis dentist appointment as I mentioned earlier may not be terribly consequential but flaking out on a cancer screening or forgetting to enroll in your company's 401K program could be a huge problem according to a recent study the average adult forgets three things each day that's in part because it's difficult to retain information if we've only thought about it once or twice you can see why teachers and spy trainers rely on repetition and drills to make information stick although we tend to underestimate its consequences forget getting is a key reason that many of us fail to follow through on anywhere from 40 to 70% of the things we intend to do ranging from making it to The Ballot Box to getting a vaccine of course the amount of forgetting increases relative to the number of tasks and stimuli you have to juggle in your day-to-day life the modern world makes it increasingly difficult to remember everything you need to do but there are strategies to help you forget less often I invited my friend and collaborator Todd Rogers to join me to talk about some important research that addresses memory forgetting and reminders I featured Todd in his research prominently in my new book how to change because he first taught me about just how important flake out and forgetting can be when it comes to acting on our best intentions Todd Rogers is a behavioral scientist and professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School hi Todd thank you so much for joining me today really happy to be here Katie first I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the evidence proving that remembering can be a real and important barrier to achievement because I think sometimes people can dismiss forgetting as sort of a trivial issue that just doesn't have important consequences sure I first started wrestling with this when we realized that almost everybody in a poll says that they intend to vote when you ask them if they intend to vote and then you look the voter file afterwards and only about half of them do actually vote now that drop off that flake out may be because they never intended to and they were just saying nice things that they thought we wanted to hear but I think a lot of people just genuinely forgot you know what's interesting is that people are more likely to flake out which is not follow through on their intentions for virtuous things as opposed to everything else so going to the gym eating healthy voting putting in extra time at work or whatever we think we should do we're more likely to flake on that than we are on other intentions like I'm going to eat dessert tonight I want to talk a bit about some of the Behavioral Science research suggesting ways that we can get better at remembering as well as some of their limits of course could you talk a little bit about planning prompts so a planning prompt is a prompt that makes people think through how they will come concretely Implement whatever they intend to do so it is a prompt that makes them fill out a plan and think through a plan for example when we do planning prompts for voting we say remember to make a plan people say they intend to vote then we say okay what time will you go on Election Day and they're like oh after 8:30 a.m. after I drop my kids off they like where will you be beforehand oh I'll be at my kids preschool what will the biggest obstacle be and then I'll say well maybe I'll be late for work and then it's well what can you do to to overcome that obstacle then the person will say something like oh I could probably start my workday a little bit later than normal so I've The Prompt has to have them think through what time they'll do it where they'll be coming from what obstacles they'll foresee and how they can overcome the obstacle and how does that help with forgetting just holding the intention in that example to vote you know I say that I form the intention a week beforehand then election day Tuesday rolls around I don't recall it and then I the day onwi and I see people with their stickers and I'm like oh shoot I was supposed to do that this morning and so the sort of the time unfolds and it I don't remember when at a time when I could have enacted my intention so the planning prompt helps link people with that moment when they can perform the action which is vote so that it comes to mind in that moment could you talk a little bit about some of the research you've done proving that this is an effective strategy for helping people follow through on their intentions sure some of the original research we did was in the 2008 presidential election uh every like I said everybody says they're going to vote but only about half do we ran an experiment a get out the vote experiment where one group of people was asked to form an intention which is basically do you intend to vote they all say yes then the other group we say what time we vote how will you get there where will you be coming from and they are randomly assigned to these different conditions there's 300,000 people in this experiment in Pennsylvania in the 2008 presidential and then we look at the voter file afterwards and we see who voted and who didn't and we find that adding the planning prompt more than doubled the impact of just asking them if they intended to vote so we run a big randomized experiment in a big election with hundreds of thousands of people and we find that adding that little short battery of questions that forces people to make a concrete plan makes them more likely to actually follow through on their voting intention I love that study okay so we've talked about planning prompts which are one solution to forgetting but how about just good oldfashioned reminders could you talk a little bit about some of the evidence suggesting that they can work too and and what their limitations are yes reminders can be powerful but when they are timely and there's a great study that involves valets returning cars to patrons and in the control group they get out of the car the patron gets in and then they drive down the road and grad students are hiding 50 fet down the road behind a bush looking at whether they're wearing a seat belt so they're interested in whether they're wearing seat belts and then in the first reminder group when the patron hands the valet the keys the valet says remember to wear your seat belt then the valet runs off four and a half minutes later comes back in the car and is getting out the the patron gets in car drives down the road the hidden grad student sees whether they're wearing the seat bels trivial to no effect basically being reminded 4 and a half minutes ago to where your seat belt had no effect but then in the really important condition the patron hands the keys to the valet the valet takes off gets the car drives up and as the valet is getting out of the car turns the patron and says please remember to wear your seat belt and then runs off and then 50 feet down the road the grad student hidden behind the bush looks at whether they're wearing the seat belt and has a giant effect on increasing of seat belt wearing and the takeaway of that is that reminders can be really powerful if they are delivered just before the behavior can be enacted but when they're delivered in some far off time they're have trivial values so think about like reminding someone six hours beforehand that they need to you know do the laundry or uh do some task versus reminding exactly in that moment or think about your phone reminding you the day beforehand to do something like these these have small effects so reminders can be really potent if you can get in front of the person in the moment when the behavior can be performed okay and I want to turn from that to one of my favorite studies that we have ever done together Todd which was your brilliant idea to sort of create a way that timely reminders could be created without technology I will say I think that's like an accurate description you had this idea that we could create reminders through Association will you describe our alien study the idea with the alien study was again people have intentions to do things in the future but they often forget to follow through with them and so how do we bring those intentions to mind exactly in the moment when they can perform it and what we did with a a coffee shop in Harvard Square was on a Tuesday we passed out hundreds of coupons that can only be used on Thursday and we passed them out to patrons leaving the coffee shop so people who intended to go back on Thursday and for half of them we just said remember to use this on Thursday and for the other half we said there's going to be a toy alien sitting in front of the cash register on Thursday when you see that alien remember to use this coupon and so the alien was always there on Thursday for everybody but for half of them it was just a weird thing that was in front of the it was a quirky coffee shop anyway but for the other half the the they noticed the alien because it's weird and they end up associating it with their coupon and so they end up becoming much more like to use their coupon that day and so we found was that associating on Tuesday the use of the coupon with the alien which would be present on Thursday May people more likely to remember to use the coupon on Thursday okay and a cynical comment sometimes people ask is like why didn't you just put a sign in front of the cash rers that on Thursday that said use your coupon yeah it's not cynical it's sensible yes why not just put a a reminder I in this coffee shop as in a lot of coffee shops there's tons of of signs in front of cash registers and so Katie you and I ran another study where we had a weird distinctive queue in front of a cash register where there were tons of other signs and another condition where there was a sign saying remember to use your coupon and people don't notice the 15th sign in front of a cash register but they do notice a weird toy alien that's never been there before and so it's really a challenge of how do you capture people's attention in the environment that you're trying to enact the behavior in awesome okay one more thing I want to talk about related to this topic is people's sophistication about their forgetting problems do you feel like people are pretty sophisticated and basically mostly solve the problem for themselves when they anticipate they might forget or you think that there's room for people to do better one thing that I think is really interesting about reminders is that everybody thinks it's obvious that remind ERS can be useful but they also don't realize how much they need reminders and so as a followup as part of our set of studies on this project uh we did a study where we offered people the chance to pay us for a reminder in the future to do something that will earn them a lot more money and so this was really a test of do they think they're going to remember and how much are they willing to pay to remember to overcome they're forgetting and what you and I found and I really like this it was a way of really showing that people massively underestimate they're forgetting and because of that they're not willing to pay to remind themselves which is just the sort of a metaphor for they're not willing to take steps like planning prompts and scheduling to make sure that they end up in that future moment following through on the thing they intended to do right and we found that basically people lost a lot of money they left a lot of money on the table if they had just paid us a small fee for a reminder they would have made a lot more in total right they're not sophisticated about their own forgetting we say they only because it is a discret set of participants but it should always be us too it should always be we don't realize how much we forget um okay how can people help themselves achieve more if they're familiar with all this research you've just described there's two different perspectives on this the first is how do I become more likely to follow through on my intentions and one is is concretely think through planning schedule things and then also set up my environment so that I'm more likely to remember I need to mail a envelope that my daughter wrote a letter to my grandmother so I put it in my shoe because I can't leave the house without putting my shoe on I'll be like what's this envelope doing oh I'm supposed to mail it basically structuring the environment so that I remember even if I think I'm going to and then the other side is how do I create an the conditions for other people to be more likely to follow through on their virtuous intentions and so the first is how do I and the other is how do I create environment for other people and that can be prompting people to make a concrete plan and sometimes that can feel patronizing uh and so you have to be Artful and delicate about it but sometimes guiding people through making a plan you often see in airports reminders that are weird and and associated with your parking spot so that you can help people remember and so like you can as a as a third party or a choice architect create an environment to help people become more likely to remember and then as just an individual like me who has a terrible memory you can just take steps proactively to protect yourself from yourself or like me I need to do that too that's why we both studied this topic Todd this was so fun thank you very much for joining me I appreciate it oh I my pleasure thanks for having me Todd Rogers is a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and the work he described here is featured prominently in a chapter of my new book how to change the science of getting from where you are to where you want to be which is coming out on May 4th I have a link to the book and to the paper on reminders through Association that Todd and I collaborated on in the show notes and at schwab.com [Music] podcast my book's key message is that there are lots of different barriers to change and to get where you want to be it's critical to understand what's holding you back and deploy solutions that are tailor made for solving those obstacles forgetting is certainly not the most pernicious barrier to change though it can be a bigger barrier than many of us appreciate the book talks about the challenge of getting started and how to overcome it by capitalizing on Fresh Starts the topic of another choiceology episode from a few seasons ago AG go it also talks about impulsivity and procrastination and how each can be mastered and it covers many of the other common obstacles to change too from low confidence to inertia a takeaway that's Central to the book and to this show that I hope you'll remember is that the right solution depends on the problem you're facing whatever your financial goals starting with a financial plan is one of the best ways to help you get there that includes breaking down your specific goals into the concrete tasks you'll need to take in order to achieve them and creating specific reminders to complete each task check out the episode of the financial decoder podcast called are Financial plans just for the wealthy to learn more you can find it at schwab.com Financial decoder or wherever you get your podcasts as Todd Rogers mentioned flaking out on virtuous intentions is is a real problem and while flake out has many causes besides forgetting including laziness and distraction forgetting may be the easiest of these obstacles to overcome timely reminders are a great solution when all you need to do is take a simple action at a known point in time but life isn't always that simple when it's not cube-based plans can be a valuable way to combat flake out and you can use this tool to help yourself or you can PR other people to make q-based plans so they'll be more likely to follow through on their best intentions q-based plans link a plan of action with a memorable Q cu's can be anything that captures your attention and triggers recall from a specific time or location to an object you expect to encounter like a toy alien in our coffee shop experiment a qbas plan takes the form when X happens I'll do y and of course you fill in your own X and Y an example of a q-based plan is whenever I get a raise I'll increase my monthly retirement savings contribution planning has a host of benefits besides the ones I've already mentioned it helps you break your goals into bite-sized chunks relieves you of the need to think about what you'll do in the moment and acts like a pledge to yourself which increases your commitment to your goal one of my close friends and collaborators at Wharton the psychologist and bestselling author angel Duckworth has done some work with NYU professors Peter golwitzer and Gabrielle eten showing just how useful q-based planning can be even for kids and I asked her to give a quick description of that work for the show here's Angela I first learned about planning prompts SL implementation intentions when I was in graduate school and I I mean my mind was blown I had just left the classroom as a math teacher and become a PhD student in Psychology and I was just like oh my gosh we should be teach teaching this to like all students everywhere so we've taught students how to make these plans on their own and also um how to do the thing that is also important for students to do which is like set goals that are important for them so not only to plan how to follow through on their goals but to set the goals in the first place and what we find in our work is that students who are even as young as like 10 years old for example can basically follow the same exact strategies as full grown adults and in fact one of our studies had students who were in fifth grade so they were about 10 but they were actually reading at a third grade level so I think the Insight is that not only are planning prompts good for adults younger people um maybe as early as eight or 10 can also benefit I really love that study and I love how handy planning prompts are but before you get too excited about the power of forming q-based plans there's an important caveat if you form too many at once you may be discouraged and your commitment May dwindle so be choosy about which goals you'll plan for at any given time and finally as you might remember from our episode on the topic of simplification when plans get complex and involve more than one or two steps checklists can be an invaluable way to keep track of things that [Music] matter you've been listening to choiceology an original podcast from Charles Schwab if you've enjoyed the show we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple podcasts you can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app and if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on choiceology about how to improve your decisions you can order my new book how to change the science of getting from where you are to where you want to be or sign up for my monthly newsletter Milkman delivers at kailman /ne newletter next time you'll hear a fascinating story about a chemistry student whose failed experiment led him to transform an industry and I'll speak with best-selling author and decision strategist Annie Duke about the hidden value of quitting I'm Dr Katie Milkman talk to you [Music] soon for important disclosures see the show notes or visit schwab.com slmp podcast