Shadowing Practice: The Surprising Reason Your Past Still Controls You - Learn English Speaking with Video
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I really want to blow your mind right now
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because it turns out that the science of human memory is an unbelievable area of research.
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It's so great.
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How do we actually construct memories in the past when I'm thinking about Lincoln City?
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Or for that matter, when I'm thinking about something really negative, when I'm thinking about something that actually happened.
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The way that I do that, and this is where the neuroscience gets really tricky, it's that it's not about retrieving that memory.
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You might think to yourself that like there's a little film, a little snippet of video someplace in your brain,
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and you go get that out of the archive
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and throw it into the projector and watch it again and again and again.
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But it turns out that's not right.
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What it's really about when you're dredging up memories, good or bad, is reconstruction, not retrieval.
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Every time you conjure up the past, there's a part of the parietal lobe in your brain.
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It's called the angular gyrus.
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And what it does is it it it reconstructs every episodic memory, which is a whole bunch of different things.
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There's a whole bunch of different elements to it, and they're stored in physically different locations.
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And so what your brain has to do every time you come up with a scene, like you tell a story
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or you remember a particular day that's in a whole bunch of different locations
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and you put it together new every single time time.
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That's a biological marvel, but it's prone to error.
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As you can imagine, if you have to reassemble it, reassemble it, reconstruct it, reconstruct it every single time,
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there's an opportunity as time goes by for glitches to get into that algorithm.
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And that's one of the reasons that tons of research shows that the further away a very distinct memory is from you,
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the more likely you are to screw it up as you recount it, to get it actually wrong.
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And for you to believe absolutely photographically in something that absolutely did not happen.
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Now, here's how the studies actually kind of work.
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This is a 1992 study.
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This is an article called Phantom Flash Bulbs, False Recollections of Hearing the News about Challenger.
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That's the Challenger space shuttle.
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They exploded in 1986.
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You probably heard about it.
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I remember this as a young adult when one of the space shuttles
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that went up into space and blew up before it got into orbit is really,
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really traumatic because half the country was watching it and it exploded.
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It was horrible.
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What researchers were doing, what they wanted to know was how did people actually remember it compared to what they had said had happened.
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And so right after the Challenger explosion, these researchers, they asked people to recount their experience right afterward when it was most faithfully recounted,
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a bunch of students who did that.
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And then 30 months later, All right.
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Okay.
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So two and a half years later, they went through and recounted the experience again.
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So they followed the same people for two and a half years.
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That's one of the reasons they didn't publish the article for almost four years after the challenger exploded.
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And in 93 % of the cases, the counts were completely inconsistent with each other.
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And in every one of the cases, they said, no, that's the way it happened.
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And it wasn't the way that it happened.
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And they had evidence, videotaped evidence that the same people were telling different stories.
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Now, this is really interesting, right?
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That's one of the reasons that I can tell you what happened on 9 -11.
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And it's probably the case that if I went back and saw my own recounting of it,
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had there been a videotape of me telling the story that what I'm telling today, I'm not trying to lie.
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I think it's accurate.
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But what was going on is the angular gyrus is reassembling the memories and getting glitches and getting, you know,
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leaving out little pieces of video and information is being added
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or information is being lost because of what I'm actually living through today.
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I'm inadvertently editing that.
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Now, one thing to keep in mind, you will see in popular culture a lot and in modern media
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and in journalism a lot where people will be telling about the crimes
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and terrible things that happened to them a long time in the past.
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And even in the court of law, and our legal system will ask people to testify in congressional testimony or in legal testimony.
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People will be asked to testify to things that happened to them a long time ago, by memory, sometimes decades ago.
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When we see this, those of us in the behavioral science community, we always just slap our foreheads because we're like,
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you know, journalists are so credulous about these testimonies.
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Or when people write in books, exactly a conversation they had when they were children or something is
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that we're photographic or
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when in the therapy industrial complex in this country professionals counselors
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social workers psychologists people in my line of work will ask young people to recount to dredge up old memories
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so they can actually find some evidence of trauma in their past those of us who who have studied memory
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we say that's not that's not credible and it's not because people lie it's because that's not my friends how memories work.
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Now, that's interesting enough, but that's actually really useful when you think about it, because reconstructing memories based on current experience gives us an opportunity,
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but we're not quite there yet.
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The reason our memories change is because the reconstruction of the stories of our past,
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it's we do that in accordance with current narratives and current events and current needs.
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In other words, you contaminate your memories based on what you're thinking about right now.
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That's one of the things that we think about.
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And I'll give you an example of this.
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Let's say that you have an old friend, somebody you hung out with in college and somebody you really,
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really, really liked, but it was a different time in your life.
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And, and, and let's say that your consciousness has been raised and you're a little bit ashamed about how you,
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how you behaved when you're in college.
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And if there's nothing you're ashamed of that happened when you're in college, well, you've just edited your memories.
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Your angular gyrus is, is, is going to town here.
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And so what typically will happen when people have great memories,
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but troubled memories, because you're not happy about the way that you behaved,
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you're sort of, you have regret or you have a sense of shame about great old times.
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What that will do is that will torque the way that you think about the people that were in those memories.
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You'll start to think more negatively about the people that you wouldn't have had a negative thought about at all.
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Another example of this is that, you know, college students will come home from college weirdly convinced
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that they suffered all sorts of trauma because their parents are so horrible in their political views.
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This is one of the things that we find.
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Now, this is actually a form of predation by people who are counseling young people sometimes to say, oh, really?
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Tell me about your dad.
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Tell me about your mom.
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Tell me about their political views.
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And when they hear they'll say, boy, who hurt you?
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Who hurt you?
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And all that's doing is inducing people to negatively valence memories that would not have had a negative valence otherwise,
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as the angular gyrus is reconstructing episodic memory in their post -adolescent brains.
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And it has nothing to do with post -adolescence.
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It has to do with brains more than anything else, which is one of the reasons that people will come back and say,
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I didn't realize how screwed up my family life was until I went to college.
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And the reason is
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because somebody who does not have your interests at heart was editing your memories by inducing
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you to think about a different way to dredge up these pictures
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and to valence them with a current way of thinking that they're trying to give to you.
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That's not great, but it's not even great when we do it to ourselves.
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Now, the shifting memories in a way, they're not entirely inaccurate because they're assembled from a pretty partial set of details.
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And the exact set that we remember changes every time as we dust the memory off.
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And by the way, your new politics might be right.
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The new way that you live and your new morals, they might be right.
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But it can ruin perfectly good experiences and turn them into bitterness along the way.
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It's interesting in the studies on this that we see, I'll put one in that.
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There's a really nice paper in Social Cognition called Emotion and Memory research, a grumpy overview that shows that when people are afraid,
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when you induce them to be fearful in laboratory settings, you show them scary movies,
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for example, and then you ask them to remember scenes from their own youth, they'll think about the threats from those times.
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They'll think of scary parts of those particular memories.
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But the same is true also when you make people really, really, really happy.
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And when people are full of love and they're laughing a lot, and you induce them to think about kind of negative things in their past,
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they'll find them really funny at the end of the day.
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And you know, you've had this experience.
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I promise you, you've had this experience.
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You could think about this a little bit, where you think about something awful that happened and you're with your friends
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and you're having a good time and you're telling the story.
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And it's like for the very first time you recount the story and you're cracking up while you're telling the story,
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that's because you provided a positive valence to what had been a negative memory.
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You're filling in the gaps as you reconstruct it with positivity.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “The Surprising Reason Your Past Still Controls You”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: memories, memory, happened. This video has 125 sentences and 1714 words to shadow. The speech runs for 8:55. The speaker talks fast, about 192 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 87% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is easy to follow.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| challenger noun | /ˈt͡ʃælənd͡ʒəɹ/ | One who challenges. |
| induce verb | /ɪnˈduːs/ | To lead by persuasion or influence; incite or prevail upon. |
| angular adjective | /ˈæŋ.ɡjə.lɚ/ | Relating or pertaining to an angle, or angles. |
| edit verb | /ˈɛdɪt/ | To change a text, or a document. |
| testimony noun | /ˈtɛstɪmoʊni/ | Statements made by a witness in court. |
| explode verb | /ɪkˈsploʊd/ | To fly apart with sudden violent force; to blow up, to burst, to detonate, to go off. |
| horrible adjective | /ˈhɔɹ.ɪ.bəl/ | Causing horror; terrible; shocking. |
| scary adjective | /ˈskɛə.ɹi/ | Causing fear or anxiety |
| trauma noun | /ˈtɹɔm.ə/ | Any injury to the body of a living thing. |
| ashamed adjective | /əˈʃeɪmd/ | Feeling shame or guilt. |
| behave verb | /bɪˈheɪv/ | To conduct (oneself) well, or in a given way; to conform. |
| reconstruction noun | /ˌɹiːkənˈstɹʌkʃən/ | The action of reconstructing something, not necessarily to the earlier state. |
| researcher noun | /ˈɹiˌsɝ.t͡ʃɚ/ | One who researches. |
| shuttle noun | /ˈʃʌtəl/ | A tool used to carry the woof back and forth between the warp threads on a loom. |
| testify verb | /ˈtɛstɪfaɪ/ | To make a declaration, or give evidence, under oath. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| turn out verb | To end up; to result. | |
| blow up verb | To explode or be destroyed by explosion. | |
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. | |
| crack up verb | /ˈkɹæk ˈʌp/ | To laugh heartily. |
| go back verb | To return to a place or state after having been there at a previous time. | |
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. | |
| leave out verb | To omit, to not include, to neglect to mention. |
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have studied · has been raised · you've just edited |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | memory, which is · students who did · people who are |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | being added · being lost · will be asked |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 43 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, faithfully /ˈfeɪθfəli/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: ashamed /əˈʃeɪmd/, reconstruction /ˌɹiːkənˈstɹʌkʃən/, shuttle /ˈʃʌtəl/, explosion /ɛkˈsploʊ.ʒən/, congressional /kəŋˈɡɹɛ.ʃə.nəl/
- Long words — get the stress right: testimony /ˈtɛstɪmoʊni/, reconstruction /ˌɹiːkənˈstɹʌkʃən/, biological /ˌbaɪ.əˈlɑ.d͡ʒɪ.kəl/, laboratory /ˈlæb(ə)ɹəˌtɔɹi/, congressional /kəŋˈɡɹɛ.ʃə.nəl/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like challenger, induce, angular.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.