Many people who pick up the Book of Mormon turn straight to the end, to Moroni’s famous invitation to ask God whether it is true. They read the part about asking. They sometimes miss what Moroni told them to do first. Before the asking comes a step that the science of memory would call essential.

Scholar of memory Charan Ranganath, in his 2024 book Why We Remember, describes the part of us that actually makes decisions as the remembering self. The judgments we reach, the conclusions that feel true, the choices we trust, all of them rest on what our minds have recently brought to the surface. Researchers call this priming. What you have just been thinking about shapes how you weigh the question in front of you. Bring certain experiences to mind, and your whole frame of evaluation shifts. A mind primed with one set of memories will read the same evidence differently than a mind primed with another.

The effect is easy to underestimate. Shown the same situation, people reach different conclusions depending on what was fresh in their minds a moment before. We like to imagine we judge from neutral ground. In truth we judge from wherever our recent remembering has set us down.

If that is how judgment works, then the way you prepare to ask a question matters as much as the question itself.