The Weird Power of “Transactive Memory”

We store a lot of our knowledge in people’s heads

Photo by Harli Marten on Unsplash

In the last few months, I’ve occasionally been fumbling around for words. I’ll try to remember the name of a movie star or historical event or a book, and — it’s not there. I can’t pull it up.

What’s wrong with my brain?

Social isolation, that’s what. Since late April, I’ve been on the road doing a coast-to-coast cycling trip across the US.

I’m doing the ride solo, which means I’ve been far away from my usual daily social connections — most specifically, my wife, my kids, and my close friends.

And isolation, it turns out, can have an affect on your memory.

It’s because of a phenomenon known as “transactive memory” — our human penchant for storing information inside the minds of other people.

When those other people aren’t near you? Boom: Some of your memory is gone.

The concept of “transactive memory” dates back to work in the 1980s by the Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner.

Wegner had long noticed that long-term couples often seem to unconsciously divide up the task of remembering various facts. One partner knows how to program the set-top box, or the birthdays of all the aunts and uncles; the other remembers the banking info and where the spare keys to the garage are stored. Each person seems to store half the information that the other person requires.

Wegner suspected that people do this because the act of remembering information is so energy-intensive for the brain. As a result, we tend to subconsciously seek efficiencies. If you know a) you’re going to be around another person every day, and b) you also know that person is very good at remembering a particular type of fact, then c) your brain quietly outsources that memory-task to the other person. When you need to retrieve that fact … you just ask them. And vice versa!

Along with his colleagues Ralph Erber and Paula Raymond, Wegner began to conduct experiments to document this dynamic. In one, they…