Don’t Look Back

I remember standing in the back of the Reptile House at the Bronx Zoo when an animal handler told my 8th-grade class that a chameleon’s most unique feature was not its ability to change colors, as we all had believed. What made these creatures truly special, he said, was they could move their eyes independently from one another, allowing them to look forward and backward…at the same time!

This blew my mind and stuck with me for many years as I thought about how confusing it must be for chameleons to see what’s ahead of them while never losing track of what they left behind. But then it occurred to me that humans have this same skill. We split our time between imagining our future and recalling our past. Looking forward and backward at the same time.

Of course, there is a difference between a chameleon’s superpower and ours. Theirs is physical. Ours is mental. They use theirs to spot potential predators sneaking up from the rear. We use ours to remember where we parked our car, the names of all those who broke our heart, and the repulsive smell of the Reptile House at the Bronx Zoo.

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Scientists and philosophers have been arguing for centuries over the essence of being human. What quality or characteristic differentiates us from every other organism that ever existed on this planet? My vote goes to memory. There are other animals that have better recall abilities than we do, but none that shape their entire existence around the moments they already lived. Who we were means as much to us as who we are and who we will become. It’s a uniquely human thing.

Our memories are often a source of comfort. They are what allow us to feel safe and secure around people and surroundings that are familiar. They tie our history to our present and provide a framework for the future using the past as prologue. But they also contribute to our sense of self by connecting us to those who came before; the people responsible for us being here. Remembering our ancestors allows them to live forever, just as our descendants remembering us will allow us to live forever.

That is why we create symbols, customs, rituals, and traditions. They keep our memories alive and make all of us relevant no matter how much time passes. They create a permanence to our existence and give meaning to our lives.

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But traditions come with a dark side. They can turn us into static thinkers and prevent us from seeing the world and ourselves in new ways. They can hold us down, hold us back, and connect us to a time that no longer exists and never will again.

These past 17 months have shined a light on the stifling effects of tradition and the danger that comes with living in the past. We reject new ideas and new opportunities in favor of the “good old days” that our memory exaggerates. We fear the future because it is an unknown and celebrate the past because it is not.

From a cognitive standpoint, there is a structural reason this occurs. Despite what many of us grew up believing, memories aren’t “stored” as exact replications of events in specific locations of our brain. They are scattered bits of information, spread across billions of neurons, and then reconstructed (never exact or fully accurate) when they are recalled. It is a little like taking a Lego model of the Eiffel Tower apart, throwing all the pieces around the room, and then rebuilding it without any blueprint or instruction manual. Inside our brain, that process requires a lot of space and a lot of energy to make it work.

Contrast that to imagination—the antithesis of memory. The brain process associated with creating something new or conceptualizing something that doesn’t exist is actually more compact and streamlined than recalling something from memory. Imagination is harder to access and explains why it plays a lessor role in our thinking. (There is a reason all of us can spell dog, but few of us can draw one.) Our brains were built primarily to use memory, not imagination. So, when faced with a problem, our chameleon-like brain defaults to looking backward—what it can remember—instead of what’s ahead—what it can conceive.

This is why imagination needs to be a deliberate effort. We have to choose to be curious, choose to be optimistic, and choose to be creative, or else we never will be. We will rely on dogma, ideology, history, and convention to guide us. Our memories will tell us what to do and how to think, just like it always has.

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“Companies can’t pay a living wage and expect to make a profit.”

“Companies can’t make a profit and expect to be socially responsible.”

“You can’t give one person an opportunity without taking an opportunity from someone else.”

“This is the way we have always taught our children.”

“This is the way we have always paid for education.”

“The climate has been changing since the beginning of time. There is nothing we can do about it.”

“That’s just the way government works.”

“Marriage is between a man and a woman.”

“You can’t identify with a gender. You can only be the sex you were assigned at birth.”

“This is a dangerous neighborhood.”

“Protestors hate this country.”

“This is the way the way we do things.”

“That will never work.”

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The handler at the Bronx Zoo may have been right about chameleons. Their greatest gift is the ability to simultaneously look forward and backward. But if we are going to mimic them, we would probably be better served learning how they change their colors.