Welcome back to the Place We Find Ourselves Podcast. I'm Adam Young and this is Episode 11.

If you want to know what's running your life, stay tuned because we're going to talk about it.

It's a thing called implicit memory. The place we often find ourselves is a place of reactivity

or reactive creatures. And that's because we have a storehouse of implicit memory.

Today's episode is intended to explain what implicit memory is and to outline why it's running

your life. Thanks for listening. Implicit memory is the thing that is running your life.

It is a very difficult concept to grasp but extremely important for understanding

why you do the things you do particularly in moments of stress or difficulty.

Let me begin with a quote by Daniel Siegel, who is a neuroscientist that has had a profound

influence on how I understand memory and therapy and story and trauma. And this is what

Siegel says about the brain. The brain is an anticipation machine that shapes ongoing

perception by what it automatically expects based on prior experience.

The brain is an anticipation machine. Its job is to anticipate whatever is going to come next.

And that in act of anticipating shapes what you then perceive in the next nanosecond.

And it anticipates based on what it expects given your prior experience.

In other words, your prior experiences prime the brain to anticipate

something familiar next. And that act of anticipating what is familiar in turn shapes your

perception of what you are presently experiencing. This is the core of implicit memory.

Implicit memory tells us what to expect around every bend.

So memory is the way in which a past experience affects how the mind will function in the future.

That's the simplest and best way to define memory. It's the way in which a past experience

affects how the mind will function in the future. By the way, it's important to note that a memory

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