Gabriel Radvansky studies mental model theory for human memory and cognition. He strives to understand how people create, organize, store and retrieve mental models. Also, how younger and older adults differ on their use of mental models. What triggered Gabriel to study cognition memory? He was hooked from the day he took his first introductory psychology class. His teacher’s description of what a psychologist did instantly caught his attention and from there he knew the path he wanted to go down. His original major in college was physics, he then switched to AI computer science and moved into psychology. Because of his other majors, he comes at psychology from a scientific approach. Gabriel has done extensive research on how a person’s environment changes ones memory. Why does walking through doors make you lose your train of thought? Moving from one environment to another, your brain naturally wants to leave some things behind and pick up new things. Different rooms represent different memories and your brain has been trained to adapt. Humans have the same type of trigger when it comes to computer windows and stories within a book – when a character goes from one location to another, information gets forgotten and lost. Memory is not about the past – we have memories so we know what to do now, and to help us know what to do in the future. What helps one memory stick more than another? The more emotion linked to a memory, the more vividly you remember those events. Memories with an emotional consequence trigger better and faster than those with no emotion linked to them. What are some steps you can take to help your memory? Write things down and have as many broad experiences as you possibly can. In this episode of Trend Following Radio: Event cognition Work environments Forgetting curve Long term vs. short-term memory Environments where our brains learn best Memory research