Unsee. How some memories are forever engrained in our minds.

And why that can be a good thing.

A friend of mine showed me how a monkey opens a banana.* I’ll never forget it. In fact, I think about it every time I open a banana. Almost every time I see a banana.

I can’t unsee it.

I can’t undo the conversation we had or how she showed me how she (and, apparently, monkeys) open a banana.

Weird, right?

Even if I wanted to unsee it, I can’t. It’s there.

If that’s the case with certain scenes, how can we make the good ones last? Here’s a tip:

We have to create those scenes.

Just like the friend who told me and showed me, we need to create (and maybe recreate) scenes we’d like to engrain in our minds. We can train ourselves to get better at this. We can, to some extent, help build the photo album of our memories.

We need to create the memories.

We need to create.

Here’s a little video I made this morning (before 7 AM … yes, I know, I’m a complete dork) of something I learned in a Chinese dim sum restaurant. I thought to myself that what they were doing was genius and wondered why we didn’t use the same technique for other foods? Turns out, I’m not the only one who noticed.

Here you go. Your “you can’t unsee” this (and I’m betting you’re going to at least give it a try once) video … which I turned into a little book trailer for my upcoming book called “Spark” about creating memories with your kids.

* They open it from the opposite end from where the stem is. Have you ever noticed that no matter how hard you tug on the stem, it will bend and often bruise the banana and still not open? Put your fingernail into just that tiny bit of brown harder crust at the other end and it’ll open in a flash. Who would know, right? Monkeys know.