#115: The weight of words

Happy Sunday, and welcome back to Plane Thoughts!

One of the abilities I’m most grateful to have been born with is a good memory.

As a student, the final stage of my exam preparation was the creation of a few pages of carefully written notes. In an exam, I could close my eyes and see the page in front of me, know exactly where the information resided, and retrieve it with near 100% accuracy.

The same is true of conversations. Any really meaningful exchange I have had in my life, I can replay almost verbatim. This is profoundly useful, but also a curse.

So, forgetting trivial things infuriates me. How can I remember the moment my childhood best friend’s mother told me Santa Claus wasn’t real, yet forget the tea at the supermarket?

A difference in encoding

There are things we forget within seconds, and others we carry for decades. A throwaway comment from a stranger dissolves into nothing. A single remark from someone close can follow us for years, replayed with unsettling clarity. The difference isn’t the words themselves; it’s how the brain decides what matters.

When someone speaks to us, the brain doesn’t store language as a transcript. It stores meaning, emotion, and implication. If a sentence carries emotional charge - especially shame, rejection, or threat - the amygdala flags it as significant. That signal tells the hippocampus to encode the moment more deeply. What we later remember isn’t just what was said, but how it felt, who said it, and what it seemed to reveal about us.

This is why negative words linger. Negativity bias leads to prioritising information that could signal danger. From an evolutionary perspective, missing a social threat was costly. Missing a compliment wasn’t. Harsh words often imply exclusion or diminished status, and the brain treats them less like opinions and more like warnings.

Memory is reconstructive

Memory also isn’t a static archive. It is reconstructive. Language doesn’t simply label experiences; it reshapes them. The words used during or after an event become woven into how it is remembered. Over time, the phrasing itself can become inseparable from memory, altering not only recall but also interpretation.

Some statements go further still. When words attach to identity: “you’re difficult”, “you’re not enough”, “you always do this”, they form schemas: mental shortcuts about who we are. Once embedded, these schemas filter future experience. Evidence that confirms them is absorbed easily; evidence that contradicts them is quietly ignored. A single sentence can become a lens through which years are viewed.

The body remembers too

The body remembers too. Emotionally painful language is often paired with physical sensations like a tightening chest, a drop in the stomach, or a subtle shutdown. Later, similar words or tones can reactivate the same response, long after the original moment has passed. The memory isn’t recalled; it’s re-experienced. (You are being ‘triggered’)

We don’t remember certain words because they were true. We remember them because the brain deemed them too important or too dangerous to forget. And that is the power of words: they don’t just describe reality. They shape the one we live inside.

Implications

Be conscious of the weight of the words you’re using, in particular with children and young people. Once spoken, they can't be taken back.

Be especially careful with the words you use with yourself.

— AJ

On my bedside table:

📖 Non-fiction: The art of spending money by Morgan Housel

🎬 Film: Scent of a woman (1992)

• Lt. Frank Slade: Do you mind if we join you? I'm feelin' you're being neglected.

• Donna: Well, I'm expecting somebody.

• Lt. Frank Slade: Instantly?

• Donna: No, but any minute now.

• Lt. Frank Slade: Any minute? Some people live a lifetime in a minute. What are you doin' right now?

💬 Quote: “What makes night within us may leave stars” - Victor Hugo

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