Remembering togetherRemembering together
All In The Mind
We feel we should be able to recall all sorts of things at will—but how often do our individual memories fail us? As part of a study on social memory, a group of cognitive psychologists and philosophers heard the shared histories of long term married couples to investigate how they combine their memories. The strategies they use could help people with dementia.
28:50•27 May 2012
Remembering Together: How Couples Share and Shape Their Memories
Episode Overview
- Couples often compensate for each other’s memory gaps, using shared details and private cues to build a fuller story.
- Effective collaboration involves gentle prompting and cueing rather than constant correction, which can hinder recall.
- Tools like diaries, calendars and smartphones act as extensions of memory, especially during stressful or tiring life stages.
- The “extended mind” idea suggests that our thinking and remembering frequently depend on external objects and close relationships.
- Understanding social memory may help design better support for older adults and people with dementia by using structured, shared remembering.
“It showed how much Elaine and I, our memories, do agree on 56 years of living together.”
What can we learn from those who have battled addiction? Here, the focus shifts to another kind of mental challenge: how people remember their lives together. This episode of All In The Mind looks at “social memory” – the way couples and families patch together the past as a team. Long‑married pairs like Elaine and Des McCarthy and June and Malcolm Stevenson share how often they lean on each other for the missing details.
As Des jokes, he might just recall that “she was dressed”, while Elaine remembers the exact hat and green dress. Cognitive psychologist Associate Professor Amanda Barnier and colleagues, including Celia Harris and philosophy professor John Sutton, study how these shared stories work. Harris finds that some couples boost each other’s recall with gentle prompts and private cues, while others accidentally derail each other with constant corrections. A single word like “egg” can sometimes unlock an entire forgotten scene.
You’ll also hear how diaries, calendars and phones act as extensions of memory. One participant says her iPhone meant that “together my iPhone and I were much more efficient than certainly I was by myself”. Sutton links this to the “extended mind” idea – that our thinking regularly stretches into tools, places and, crucially, other people.
The conversation turns to ageing and dementia, raising tough questions about what happens when someone loses a partner or is moved away from familiar objects and routines. One researcher compares the death of a long‑term spouse to “losing a part of their own brain”. Yet Barnier stresses that older adults can do “remarkably well” when tested in the social systems they actually live in, rather than alone in a lab.
If memory is something we build between us, who are the people and tools quietly holding your story together?
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