Ben Sclodnick is a postdoctoral fellow in Psychology at McMaster University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Have you ever been on a long drive and suddenly realized that you barely remember the past several minutes of driving?

Although the thought of driving without paying conscious attention to the road may be unsettling, we actually carry out complex behaviours without much thought all the time — and it’s all thanks to our memory.

In its simplest form, memory does one basic job: it forms associations between things that occur together. Just as we learn to associate a name with a face, or a scent with a food, memory allows certain contexts to become associated with specific thoughts and actions.

For instance, when we learn to drive, we’re taught to move our foot to the brake pedal whenever we see brake lights ahead. As we gain experience behind the wheel and these two events repeatedly occur together, we quickly reach a point where we automatically get set to press the brake pedal the moment we see brake lights — without needing to think about doing so.

Or perhaps you’ve noticed how fluently you can navigate through the apps and menus on your smartphone — as if your thumbs have little minds of their own — and that if someone re-organizes the apps on your home screen, this fluency can be difficult to relearn.

Each time we do something, our memory system makes connections between the behaviour and the current context. With experience, behaviours that once required conscious control can be activated automatically when we encounter a familiar context.

These automatic behaviours show how memory can control our behaviour without the need to consciously remember past events. Some researchers even call this form of memory “automatic control.”

Because automatic memory is by nature unconscious, we often don’t notice how essential it is for most of our everyday behaviour. Automatic memory allows us to function efficiently.

If we couldn’t rely on automatic control to trigger key actions while driving, we would be far less likely to survive those episodes of highway mind-wandering. If every thought and action required a conscious choice, something as simple as walking and talking would become an enormously demanding task.

Automatic decision-making

Driving scenarios are relatable, which makes them useful for illustrating how automatic memory works. They also show how important this form of memory is for us to function effectively.

However, once you begin looking for automatic memory elsewhere, it becomes difficult to identify behaviours that don’t rely on these unconscious processes. Even our attempts to consciously control our attention may depend on automatic processes.

For example, why is it that certain things come to mind when we walk into a meeting with our boss — while very different things come to mind when you get together with an old friend? It’s not as if we always make conscious decisions about what to remember in these cases.

The explanation is that these two different scenarios are each associated with different sets of past experiences. When we encounter a particular person, experiences associated specifically with them spring to mind automatically as a result of the memory associations we’ve formed over time.

Although automatic memory is essential to our daily functioning, it does come at a cost. For instance, we all find ourselves acting the same way over and over in familiar situations — even when those actions run contrary to the way we’d prefer to act. But the truth is, if we want to change our patterns of behaviour, we need repeated opportunities to form new associations so that our automatic behaviours being to align with our goals.

One strategy for overcoming automatic memory is to practise the behaviours you want to change in new contexts. For example, if you find that having difficult conversations with your partner always ends with you to reacting negatively without meaning to, perhaps you need to try having those discussions in front of a friend or therapist.

Changing the context like this can help reduce the chance that your typical responses will be activated, making it easier to practise changing your behaviours in critical moments.

For behaviours that have been built over a lifetime, there’s no quick hack. Relearning takes time and effort.

That is why, as an expert in memory and attention, I have compassion for people who struggle to change old habits. It’s also why I’m downright terrified when the city adds a new stop sign to an intersection where drivers are used to having the right of way.

Ben Sclodnick is a postdoctoral fellow in Psychology at McMaster University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.