Who shares your transactive memory?

The idea of “transactive memory” is fascinating to me. In short, it’s the idea that you allow others to remember parts of your life (and vice-versa) so that you don’t have to hold it all in. For example, my wife is helping my daughter get ready to head off to the University of Georgia this fall, so she is well-versed in how the UGA scheduling works. On the other hand, if our wifi at the house goes down, she relies on me to know how all of our routers and switches are connected in order to get things back up and running. It works well.

It was summarized well in the book “ The Bomber Mafia “, as shared here:

The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies-that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner…