Even for those of us who were never big football fans, World Cup stickers, Dragon Ball cards, or whatever else happened to be popular, felt part of an experience that all kids found themselves swept into. Since those sticker albums began to be published to coincide with the tournament hosted in Mexico, children of the 70s, 80s, and 90s grew up amid that fever, which psychology has long treated as an unusual field of study.
The key isn’t in the sticker album itself, nor in the World Cup celebration, but in something that psychology experts have been studying for years. A phenomenon that many of those generations experienced firsthand, yet newer ones can do less and less: mnemonic traces.
Why Your Brain Remembers Best What You Can Touch
Back in 1972, a psychologist straddling Estonia and Canada, Endel Tulving, proposed that not all memory works the same. Our brain separates data and concepts into something called semantic memory, while experiences and everything they represent are stored under another type of memory, episodic.
To the fascinating possibility of anchoring both types of memory, the reason that when you recall an experience another cue pops into your head—the lyrics of a song and a pivotal moment of your adolescence—Tulving added a further twist. For the psychologist, episodic memory grew stronger the more stimuli it received.
That is, if at that moment you touched something or could capture its smell, its memory, its mnemonic trace, it will always be deeper and more resistant to forgetting. Even decades later, having manipulated a physical object gave you enough cues to anchor that memory even more firmly in your head.
That, with a bit of effort, you end up remembering the smell of those stickers, their texture, the stickiness of their adhesive, or even the economics of the change involved in completing the album during recess, says a lot about why you remember Bebeto’s sticker.
The phenomenon is even more striking if we apply it to today, not confining it to the 70s and 90s, but transferring it to present generations. Being able to recall which sticker you were missing to complete that album after twenty years also explains why you can’t remember which photo you shared on social media a month ago.
The Sticker Generation Versus the Screen Generation
What lives on the screen of your phone or computer may boast endless pixels and resolution, but it lacks those additional cues capable of anchoring a memory in your brain. This, which today might seem anecdotal, could have consequences tomorrow when we understand what actually happens to those young people who have not managed to establish a solid mental autobiography.
Having a clear sense of when and how ends up being as important as what when it comes to looking back. Beyond the business of sticker albums like the World Cup, those packets of stickers became a mnemonic device filled with signals extraordinarily effective, and not only for the data each sticker provided, but for all the tactile cues, smells, and even social influence that anchored memories.
Studies that have already highlighted how real objects are more memorable than photographs of those same objects are just the tip of an iceberg that grows even larger as we move into a predominantly digital world. If we are unable to anchor memories because fully digital experiences and the phone’s photo gallery don’t allow for the same kind of anchoring, the very structure of our memory could be affected.
As we grow older and memory begins to play a key role in our stability, having a robust autobiographical memory can be a valuable help. It’s almost surreal that what, at the time, seemed like a silly waste of time—sticking stickers—could become something more important in the future than we could have imagined.
We did know it was a bad deal for the weekly allowance economy that our parents gave us, but not how it would shape our future. What we still don’t know is what will happen when, in due course, those who didn’t have the chance to anchor memories due to a completely digital world face the challenge of trying to remember.
Image | Nano Banana
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