At some point in a working writer’s career, you sit across from someone who knows everything about a subject. Twenty years inside a subject lived from every possible angle. They can answer any factual question about that subject you put to them.
But when you ask about their journey, they hesitate. Personal questions about how they arrived there, what changed them, and what mattered most growing up — insightful information that lays the groundwork for a story — and all of a sudden, details blur and the interview stalls.
Somehow, you still get what you need by approaching the conversation from different angles. You leave the room and write the piece. You have your story.
So what happened to the expert in that room?
Were they being evasive? Are they too modest to talk about their personal interests? Maybe. But it might also have something to do with the way our brains compress memories.
Way back in the 1980s, my friend Joey got a new skateboard. It was a Powell Peralta Tony Hawk. Purple bright with a bird skull and cross. Joey, Justin, and I each took turns attempting ollies on the edge of the sidewalk. We couldn’t quite land them, but we had lots of fun attempting the trick.
Then, across the street: “You got a quarter, yo?”
We knew the script. This wasn’t actually a question. The kid yelling across the street didn’t need a quarter. Neither did his three buddies, smiling (not the Duchenne variety), eager to hear our response. We were being tested on the corner of Jersey and Montgomery in Jersey City, in front of the public library, in our grey pants and white shirts and burgundy blazers with SPS stitched on the pocket. Saint Peter School. Fresh meat.
The kids shouting were probably from the nearby public school, less than a mile away. When school let out, some of these kids were known to hunt Catholic school kids to pick on. Responding would have meant engagement. Ignoring them might have worked, but we weren’t going to take that chance, as fighting back wasn’t an option. We were three scrawny middle schoolers, not built for a physical follow-through.
So Joey invented an option on the fly. He noticed a man walking at a snail’s pace nearby. Older. Short, just a little taller than us. Maybe drunk. Definitely an adult.
“Can you pretend to be our father?” Joey asked.
The man didn’t say yes. He didn’t say no either. He just didn’t push us away when we walked beside him. Joey thought about holding his hand and smartly reconsidered. We were already too close, unnaturally close. The smell of alcohol and cigarettes invading our air. We just walked slowly, the four of us, as if this were a normal Tuesday afternoon stroll.
Nothing else happened, and the kids went on their devilishly merry way, maybe to find someone else to pick on.
So, what happened?
We changed the messaging. It wasn’t worth the effort to jump us anymore.
What the Brain Keeps
That afternoon happened about 40 years ago. I’ve told versions of it since — to friends, to colleagues, mostly to myself — and now to you. I can’t be certain every detail here is exactly as it was. The man might have been taller than I remember. Maybe he didn’t smell of alcohol and cigarettes, but had a certain une odeur désagréable that seemed to cling to our nostrils. I know the skateboard was purple, for sure. Or was it? The details blur at the edges. But when I tell this story, I’m back on that corner, caught between the thrill of ollies we never landed and the quiet relief of safety we somehow reached. But did it happen exactly as I recall it from my memory today?
That kind of memory, vivid in some places and uncertain in others, turns out to have a neurological explanation. Recently, researchers at Oxford, University College London, and the Italian National Research Council published a paper exploring how episodic memory works: how the brain forms, stores, and retrieves meaningful experience. Their central finding: the brain compresses memory rather than records it.
The authors note: “Memory in natural creatures is a constructive process — not an exhaustive recording of all that has happened in the past. During encoding of memories, a compressed representation is formed that can subsequently be used for reconstruction of the event during recall.”
This compression creates a version that is efficient and easy to store, but loses most of the details that made the original experience navigable to someone who was actually there. The researchers explain that episodic memory works in layers, like a “compressed representation of a short sequence of events.” Kind of like a “sentence is a compressed representation of a sequence of words, and a word is a compressed representation of a sequence of letters.” This compression feature used by our brains is useful for storage, but difficult, on its own, to share.
The version of that afternoon in Jersey City I just told you is a reconstruction from that compressed file (which originated circa 1985 — who knows). What survived were the elements the story eventually needed: the threat, the on-the-fly option of escape, the man who became a temporary father, perhaps unknowingly, and the feeling of safety at the end. What likely didn’t make it to my story was everything that didn’t serve a purpose in the telling.
Each time a memory is recalled, it is rebuilt from the compressed representation using what the person currently knows, believes, and needs the story to do. Research published in Neuroscience suggests that “memory retrieval is a goal-directed activity,” shaped by the brain’s “need for consonance, alignment, and internal stability.” The stories we carry are records of past events, but the brain edits them around what those experiences came to mean.
The act of telling, the researchers from the episodic memory study found, can influence the memory itself. The reconstruction of the memory updates the stored version: “telling the story can influence our memory of it.” Which means every time I’ve told the story of that corner in Jersey City, I’ve been doing something closer to revision than recollection.
For writers, episodic memory has practical implications in their work. The questions you ask, the order you ask them, and the language you use all influence how the expert reconstructs their experience in the moment. By the time an interview ends, the story has already begun. Without you in the room, that story may not have ever seen the light of day.
The purple Powell Peralta survived forty years of retelling because it places us in a specific world, a specific era, a specific kind of kid. I really don’t know if it was a Powell Peralta. I had to research period skateboards to find something that sort of matches what I remember. Other details that weren’t serving the story probably faded without my noticing.
A study on the role of human memory for narratives found that the brain naturally organizes experience into sequence and coherence. The authors write: “Recalls … seem to follow the original narrative order rather than the actual scrambled presentation, pointing to a contextual reconstruction of the story in memory.” Which may explain why a 40-year-old afternoon in Jersey City still arrives in order, with a beginning, a threat, and a resolution. The story I’m telling you now is likely more orderly than the afternoon itself was. Over time, memory compression is less like forgetting and more like editing.
What the Writer Finds
What does this mean for the people whose job is to tell stories?
The expert in the room has years of knowledge and memories associated with acquiring it. But that memory part might be compressed. For example, it might be true that a researcher got inspired by a television program early in their life, but that detail may not matter in the paper they’re looking to publish. So that memory is likely somewhere in their brain, but it’s compressed, waiting for the right person to draw some of it out. If the goal is to tell a story, the person responsible for drawing the memory out is a writer.
What the expert knows may have folded in on itself so thoroughly that the original sequence of discovery is no longer readily visible until someone asks. The dead ends. The wrong turns. The precise moment an idea finally became clear. All the elements that transform a piece from a sort of overview or announcement into a story. This is what gets lost without a writer in the room. It is the writer’s ability to ask those probing questions that gets an expert, who lives in their research and ideas, to reconstruct something that lives somewhere in their brain in compressed form.
Think of it like a digital zip file. Compression makes it portable and storable. But unlike a zip file, which restores everything to its original state when opened, the brain doesn’t restore without losing some context. Each time the file is opened, it comes back slightly different — updated by time, by meaning, by what the story has needed to become. The original is still in there, somewhere. But every recall is version 2. Or version 17.
When writing about scientific topics or complex research ideas, the story is about the experience of arriving at the knowledge, rather than simply possessing it. Without that, there is no story.
The writer’s job is to reopen those memories and get the expert on the path of storytelling.
We didn’t overpower the kids across the street that afternoon. Joey introduced an element that reorganized the scene, and the situation read differently for them. The man wasn’t strong. And we were lucky the kids didn’t pursue their original intent: to kick our butts. The man was just in the right place at the right time. Three scrawny kids with a skateboard, walking next to a grown man, became too much to deal with.
Something similar happens with storytelling. The knowledge doesn’t change. The positioning does. What gets produced — the piece, the story, the explanation that finally helps someone who is not an expert understand — is something that didn’t fully exist before the writer was in the room.
TL;DR
The brain compresses memories. Every time we recall something, we’re not playing back a recording. We’re reconstructing it from a reduced version of the original, shaped by what we currently know, believe, and need the story to mean. Details that serve the story survive. Other details fade.
This is what writers do for experts. A subject matter expert’s knowledge has compressed so thoroughly that the original sequence of discovery — the confusion, the dead ends, the moment it finally clicked — might no longer be readily visible, even to them. The writer’s job is to reopen that sequence, asking the questions that bring it back to the surface and tell the story.
Without a writer in the room, what gets lost is the story of how the knowledge became knowledge. What remains is only the conclusion.
Fantastic essay. I want more.
When I was an investigative reporter I ran into the memory compression thing more then once when interviewing people and finding that the tellings of a memory differed even a few weeks apart when told by the same person. Hard to parse out the truth this way but knowing the mechanism for how it works is helpful!
I love this story. And the connection to memory makes perfect sense. I've long looked at interviewing subjects as a kind of hypnosis, lulling the subject into a more relaxed state that makes it easier for them to recall details that are important to the story I want to tell. I never really thought about the science behind it, though.