Why Men Never Remember Anything

Melissa Dahl

Recently, I was visiting my family in Seattle, and we were doing that thing families do: retelling old stories. As we talked, a common theme emerged1. emerge: 出现。. My brother hardly remembered anything from our childhood, even the stories in which he was the star player2. star player: 主角。. (That time he fell down the basement steps and needed stitches in the ER?3. basement: 地下室；stitch: 缝合；ER: emergency room，急诊室。Nope. That panicky4. panicky: 恐慌的，害怕的。afternoon when we all thought he’d disappeared, only to discover he’d been hiding in his room, and then fell asleep? Nothing.) “Boys never remember anything,” my mom huffed5. huff: 气鼓鼓地说。.

She’s right. Researchers are finding some preliminary evidence that women are indeed better at recalling memories, especially autobiographical ones.6. preliminary: 初步的；autobiographical: 自传性的。Girls and women tend to recall these memories faster and with more specific details, and some studies have demonstrated that these memories tend to be more accurate,too, when compared to those of boys and men. And there’s an explanation for this: It could come down to the way parents talk to their daughters, as compared to their sons, when the children are developing memory skills.

To understand this apparent gender divide in recalling memories,7. apparent: 明显的；divide: 差异，差别。it helps to start with early childhood—specifically, ages two to six. Whether you knew it or not, during these years, you learned how to form memories, and researchers believe this happens mostly through conversations with others, primarily8our parents.These conversations teach us how to tell our own stories, essentially;when a mother asks her child for more details about something that happened that day in school, for example, she is implicitly communicating that these extra details are essential parts to the story.9. essentially: 本质上，基本上，后半句中essential意为“重要的，必需的”；implicitly: 含蓄地。

女孩们，你们有没有这样的体会，男友总是记不住你们的各种纪念日，而当你想回忆往日的甜蜜时光时，他却好像从未经历过一样……你忍不住怀疑：他的记忆是不是被人偷走了？抑或这是所有男人的通病呢？或许他们在这方面真的没有天赋啊。

And these early experiments in storytelling assist in memorymaking, research shows. One recent study tracked preschool-age kids whose mothers often asked them to elaborate when telling stories; later in their lives, these kids were able to recall earlier memories than their peers whose mothers hadn’t asked for those extra details.10. track: 追踪；elaborate: 详细阐述；peer: 同龄人。

But the way parents tend to talk to their sons is different from the way they talk to their daughters.Mothers tend to introduce more snippets11. snippet: 片段。of new information in conversations with their young daughters than they do with their young sons, research has shown.And moms tend to ask more questions about girls’emotions; with boys, on the other hand, they spend more time talking about what they should do with those feelings.

This is at least partially a product of parents acting on gender expectations they may not even realize they have,and the results are potentially longlasting, explained Azriel Grysman, a psychologist at Hamilton College who studies gender differences and memory.12. psychologist: 心理学家；Hamilton College: 汉密尔顿学院，美国一所私立学院。“The message that girls are getting is that talking about your feelings is part of describing an event,” Grysman said. “And for boys,emotions are something to be concerned with when they are part of a larger issue, but otherwise not. And it’s quite possible, over time, that those tendencies will help women establish more connections in their brains of different pieces of an event, which will lead to better memory long-term.”13.“女孩学到的是在描述事情时加入自己的感受，”格莱斯曼说，“而对于男孩子来说，除非遇见更大的事情，否则情绪就并不是那么重要。并且随着时间的推移，女性更有可能在大脑中将一件事的不同片段联系起来，这将有助于她们的长期记忆。”

Because a memory doesn’t exist the way we tend to imagine it; it’s not a singular14. singular: 单独的。, fully formed thing buried in some small corner of the mind. Instead, it’s “a pattern of mental activity, and the more entry points we have to what that pattern might be, the more chances we have to retrieve it,”15. 相反，它是“心理活动的一种模式，对于这种模式，我们有越多的切入点，重获记忆的机会就越大。”entry point: 切入点；retrieve: 重获。Grysman said. Researchers call those entry points “retrieval cues,” and they can be as seemingly mundane as what you were feeling,16. retrieval cue: 回想提示，提取线索；mundane: 平凡的。what you were eating, or what you were wearing.

The more entry points you’ve got about an event, the more likely you are to remember it. It’s how Grysman advises his students to study for tests. “I tell them to try to make links between the material they’re studying and other parts of their lives, and those other parts of their lives serve as entry points,” he said.

So Grysman’s theory, which he explored in an extensive review of the literature published last year, is that those early conversations with your parents implicitly told you which details are important to remember about the things that happen to you,and which are not.17. 因此，格莱斯曼在研究了大量去年出版的文献后得出的结论就是：你早期跟父母的对话暗示了哪些细节对于记住发生的事来说是重要的，哪些是不重要的。extensive: 大量的，广泛的。And because parents’ conversations with girls include references to both more information and more emotion,they’re setting their daughters up to have stronger memories over their lives. (Though it’s worth pointing out: Grysman acknowledges in his 2013 paper that gender identity is of course much more complicated than biological sex, and not every individual’s experience is going to mirror that of the children in the research on which he’s based his theory.18. 但值得注意的是：格莱斯曼在他2013年发表的论文中承认，性别认同比生理性别要复杂得多，而且并非每个个体都与其理论研究的对象有相同的经历。gender identity: 性别认同；mirror: v. 与……相似。)

At this point in our conversation, I couldn’t help asking Grysman how his own memory is. “I thought I had a great memory until I got married,” he said. “Now, I’m realizing more and more how much I don’t remember, compared to somebody else. Dates, facts, figures—I’m great at those things. But those are things where we don’t find gender differences. I can quote you the Stanley Cup19. Stanley Cup: 斯坦利杯，国家冰球联盟的最高奖项。winners back from 1914, but I can’t remember conversations.”

And that’s actually how he became interested in studying gender difference in autobiographical memory recall in the first place. Several years ago, his wife referenced some recent,important conversation they’d apparently had with a friend. He had no memory of it. “That’s really what spurred20. spur: 刺激，激励。this,” he said.So I asked him if he remembered now what that conversation was about.

“I don’t,” he admitted, “and maybe that proves the point.”