Memories key to curiosity, better life

If Brian DesRoches could live his life over, he’d be a better father.

He wouldn’t just take his kids to the zoo, like he used to.

He’d take them there to watch their faces. He’d ask them questions.

Why did his daughter always love the nocturnal animals so much? Why did his son stare into the eyes of a gorilla and seem totally entranced?

DesRoches is a Seattle-based psychotherapist and expert on how memories form. And how memories, for better or worse, control us more than most of us think.

He says all of us live two lives, not one. The one we are most aware of is much about facts: objective, rational, what to do at work today, what to eat tonight, how much the new car cost.

Then there’s the emotional life — intangible, subjective. It has nothing to do with facts or keeping appointments or rationality. It has a great deal to do with how we fall in love or why we become astronauts, or zookeepers. Or criminals.

DesRoches was a speaker at an unusual convergence in Wichita this past week.

Memory shapes us

His audience, at the Sedgwick County Zoo, included 40 directors and other professionals from 27 zoos pondering how to create more inspiring zoos. But DesRoches said the findings by neuroscience about memory formation can apply to anyone. His formula for a better life: realize how memory shapes us and use it to make ourselves more curious.

“That’s what I’d do differently with my kids, if I could live it over again,” he said. “I’d be far more curious.”

He’s excited about how recent neuroscience discoveries about human memory might help us all become happier people, better parents, better spouses, better boyfriends and girlfriends, better leaders. He helps families needing therapy. He uses what he’s learned about neurons to train dentists to help calm their patients.

What our memories drive us to do (or not do) is a dominant force in our lives — and can help us if we learn to channel it, he said. Memories, when channeled properly, lead immediately, he said, to one of the great driving emotions of life — curiosity.

Most of us don’t pay enough attention to our curiosities or our emotional sides. But as he told zookeepers gathered in Wichita on Thursday: Memories are narratives we write about ourselves all the time — without realizing it.

GLMV, the Wichita architecture firm that organized the gathering, designs zoos, among other things. And the GLMV architects try to do much more than merely give people glimpses of apes and orangutans and giraffes and lions.

Craig Rhodes, the zoological architect for GLMV, designed many of the exhibits at the Sedgwick County Zoo. The new elephant exhibit was designed, in part with vivid memories brought back from Africa by zoo director Mark Reed. The elephants and their exhibit area literally surround visitors. DesRoches toured the exhibit himself and happily hugged people who watched the elephants alongside him.

Designs like that can inspire intense memories, DesRoches said.

Pairing a psychotherapist with zookeepers is not an odd partnership, he said. Businesses and agencies these days are hiring “thought leaders,” and pushing to make themselves more inspiring.

A key to happiness, he said, is inspiring memories. Memories light fires of curiosity, in our children, in our spouses and partners, in our friends — and especially in ourselves. Those memories can last a lifetime, shaping our lives, driving us forward, long after the event that created the memory occurred.

Memories also can hurt, he said.

Memories can hurt

DesRoches helped a client in therapy a few weeks back. She was nine years old.

The girl was a good student until an intense experience in school created a hurtful memory, which pretty much shut her down, as a student, as a child, as a person.

There was a classroom discussion about the solar system. The girl was doing well, having fun, until the moment the teacher asked her to point to the moon. The girl pointed to the planet Uranus instead. The other kids laughed.

The girl shut down, bad enough that her mother was feeling frantic by the time she took her to DesRoches. Every time she went to class, the girl froze, remembering that raising her hand and speaking prompted kids to laugh.

That’s how negative memory can hurt us, DesRoches said. They can last a long time, and diminish our lives. “I’ve known people in their 60s and 70s who have negative memories like that. The pain is still with them.”

One reason sufferers of wartime post traumatic stress syndrome suffer so much is that the negative memory takes the victim back, in an almost physical way, to the moments when they felt traumatized under fire. Years after the battles, a memory can take the victim right back there, scared, sweating and fighting just to breathe.

Brain’s primary function

Neuroscientists now think there’s almost a form of hard-wiring going on in our brains when memories are formed, DesRoches said.

When something emotionally intense happens to us, our level of alertness goes way up. And neurons in our brain not only fire but connect to each other in the part of the brain where memories live. “Neurons that fire together wire together,” he said.

So at the molecular brain level intense experiences, whether good or disastrous, can program our thinking and shape our lives for a lifetime.

We don’t even realize this is happening most of the time, he said.

But consider this:

Most people would rather be happy than be worried, he said.

And yet sometimes people worry, which gets in the way of happiness.

Why? Neuroscientists, DesRoches said, now think that the brain is an organ with a purpose.

”The brain’s primary function is to ensure your survival, not your happiness,” he said.

So, for example, let’s say you see something unpleasant, and that something prompts you to remember an unpleasant memory.

Suddenly you worry, and you worry a lot.

You’re not happy, in part because your brain has kicked into a kind of overdrive, urging you to focus on the unpleasant sight and the unpleasant memory. You are worrying because your brain wants you to solve a problem and avoid getting hurt or thwarted in some way.

Deficit of ‘I matter’

Do you crave romance in your life?

Here’s how DesRoches says memory plays in that human endeavor.

Pay attention, guys:

“Most of us grow up with a deficit of memories of us being significant,” he said. “We have a deficit of feeling that ‘I matter. I count for something.’”

“It’s the biggest deficit in people. It happens not because our parents didn’t love us. It’s just that our parents had busy lives, and you reach for their attention, and they say ‘Honey, I’m busy.’”

“So your experience of yourself is ‘I don’t matter.’ Especially if you are five years or younger.”

This baggage is heavier for women than for men, he said.

“Women spent many thousands of years getting pushed to the background. They didn’t get to vote until … when? Only 80 years ago? Women were pushed to feel emotionally insignificant.

“So when someone actually engages a woman in conversation, when someone is genuinely curious and asks what she thinks, and then listens and cares about what she says, well, it’s rare. And that woman is going to think “Oh ... my ... God!”

“One thing you learn in psychotherapy is that what your patients want is to feel that they matter to you, that what they say is important. So in all relationships, the way you become successful is simple: Be present. Engage them, with open curiosity.

“All this behavior is based in memories.”

This story was originally published June 11, 2016 at 3:23 PM with the headline "Memories key to curiosity, better life."