On Memory
Life/ Philosophy/ Comment (???? I don’t really know.)
Blown Glass, Dale Chihuly.
Quick Summary: In this Substack, I look at the fallibility of memory and suggest why we are much more aware of this than in the past. I underline the importance of memory. I conclude by suggesting that there are freedoms to be had as a result of this fallibility - opportunities offered if we are honest about the limitations of memory. (Trigger warning - there is a brief mention of sexual assault.)
My best friend in Year 5 thought she could see into the future. I remember her revealing the existence of visions under the tree in our primary school playground. I think my reaction disappointed her. I told her I had thought the same and I instructed her to keep a diary, to write down the visions as she had them. She’d soon find they weren’t real. Instead, it was something called ‘De Ja Vu’. That’s those superpowers quashed. What can I say? Crushing dreams since 2010.
It’s the first memory I have of how our brains trick us. And even then (ironically), I’m not entirely sure I can trust it. The memory itself has been retrieved. When the event happened, certain neurons fired in my ten year old brain. When I’ve remembered the event in intervening years, I’ve brought back online some of the neurons present in the original experience - I’ve retrodden the original neural pathway. Where there are gaps from missing neurons, I’ve filled them in with a reconstruction of the event, and every time I’ve thought of the memory in the intervening years, I’ve placed the memory in a ‘labile’ state. This is one where it’s more susceptible to distortion. Given the memory is now thirteen or so years old, I can’t help but wonder how much bearing the memory in my head has on the events that actually occurred.
We’ve never been so aware of the fallibility of memory. Part of this is from scientific research - Kahneman and Taversky; mnemonics and memory palaces; Levitin and Luria. Part of this is from popular culture - conversations around false memories and gaslighting. Part of this is an ageing population and the rising prevalence of dementia. More and more people watch a loved one totally forget themselves. Part of this is exams. Often our formative years are spent chafing against the limits of memory, trying to push them wider. All of this serves to reinforce a strange and unsettling truth. Our memory is fallible.
This is really unsettling. Memory is everything. It is how we condemn, how we teach, how we exist; what we are and what we have been. It is what allows us to persist from one moment to the next, what takes us from yesterdays to tomorrows, what allows us to recognise a friend in the street, what holds us from person to person.
Oliver Sacks writes of a Mr G, a man whose memory ceased functioning. He could be introduced to someone, and then greet them as a stranger a few moments later; write about what he was doing and then marvel at the existence of unrecognised words in his own handwriting. Sacks describes how he is ‘isolated in a single moment of being, with a moat or lacuna of forgetting all round him . . . He is a man without a past (or future), stuck in a constantly changing, meaningless moment.’ It’s a harrowing image. Mr G existed in a series of perpetual presents. Without the undergirding of memory, there was nothing to connect them into something resembling a person. Without memory, a large chunk of our personhood is lost.
So this is memory, the breakable foundation on which everything is built. Thinking about this fallibility leads to an unease - like doing laundry in the aftermath of a spate of exploding washing machines, or using the Tube when there’s recently been a terrorist attack. We can’t help using the tool, even though we no longer fully trust it.
I’ve been obsessed with the fact that memory is fallible for a long time. There’s lots of reasons for this, but a big one is because I publicly accused someone of sexual assault based on my memory of events. I don’t want to dwell on this for too long (it was a long time ago). But this put me headfirst into the weirdness of how memory is both so important and also fallible. It’s not an academic question. Almost every important decision we make, almost everything we do, we do with memory - including decisions that have a huge impact on ourselves, the people around us, and even strangers we’ve never met.
Speaking up about this drunken, year old memory is one of the scariest things I’ve ever had to do. I knew about the fallibility of memory. I knew of Kahneman and Taversky, about false memories and implanted consciousness, the plasticity of memory, the science behind it. I’d watched memories flatten from 3D, to 2D to propositions to gestures at absent propositions. I’d seen holidays recede from expanses of time, to a highlights reel, to maybe a couple of meals. I knew how memory can distend and distort. And yet I still needed to speak up. I needed to use the faulty tool.
The public accusation had real ramifications, both for myself and for a lot of others. It was dropping a bomb on innocent people - that persons family, their mother, their ex-girlfriend and friends. It impacted my family, my relationship, my friends. And I was dropping that information on the basis of something that I was aware could be faulty. This was incredibly daunting.
It’s odd, because if I’d had to use the evidence in my head - my memory of what had occurred - to speak up for my sister, my mother, a friend, a stranger, I could have done so in a heartbeat. But speaking up for myself seemed to require a higher threshold, a totally indubitable certainty - a certainty that wasn’t enough from fallible memory alone. I was lucky that I had ballast. There was supporting evidence in the call I made to my best friend the day after, the pages and pages of writing as I tried to fit what had happened into the words available to me, the physical ways in which my body kept the score. Levitin calls this the ‘externalisation of memory’, the way that we press our memory outwards into the world around us. Without that, I’m not sure I could have spoken up on the basis of my physical memory alone - even though I really needed to. All these other things had formed a ledger that - in conjunction with what was in my head - meant I felt able to speak up, to be sure of what the faulty tool was telling me.
Even though this allowed me to move on from what had happened, this didn’t change the fact that I was now very aware of how limited our memory is - of how much is forgotten, how much is distorted, how much of our time falls away, goes unevidenced and unrecorded. For a long time, I reacted to this by trying to extend those limits. Time could be used in one of four ways. It could be remembered - which required novelty, trying something new, the creation of moments worth preserving. It could be shared - exist in the maybe-remembered, maybe-not hinterland that other peoples memory represents. It could be compacted, squashed down in pursuit of a goal that would attest to the times existence. Or it could be creative - evidenced in something that was built, written, made.
Needless to say, this is not a super healthy way to live (you’ll note there’s not a ‘time can be enjoyed for the sake of it’ in there.)
Part of this year has been coming to terms with the fact that - no matter what I do - the amount of time remembered will always be far smaller than the amount of time I live through. It is pretty futile to try and preserve more of your time. No matter how many new things you do, how hard you work, how much you create - the big story remains that most of your time will get forgotten (happy Wednesday everybody!). This sounds super depressing. But it doesn’t need to.
Part of this is because it’s just a fact. It’s not something you can change, it’s just what is. Worry about it, or don’t; spend time fretting or not - you’re still going to forget. If anything, it can encourage taking some time for your present self, for enjoyment - if it’s going to be forgotten regardless, you may as well be happy.
But a corollary of this fact is that there is uncertainty - about what has been, and how others have acted. There’s a set of ways things-might-have-been stretching out from beyond what our memory tells us is. Given there may be distortion, there is now a range of possibilities that surround the events that we recall. And there is something we can do with this uncertainty.
Uncertainty - in all its forms - offers the opportunity to be generous. When you do not know what someones motive is (uncertainty from the privacy of other minds), you may as well think the best of them. When you do not know how your past has gone, you may as well think that it has gone well. When you don’t know what exists beyond a certain information horizon - when you can’t know - pragmatically, it makes sense to think the best of it. The fallibility of memory offers a set of what might-have-been and could-have-happened, and we can choose out of the options available to try and think the best of things and of people. (See On Vipassana: Part 2: The Big Thoughts for more.) At least for me, seeing the fallibility of memory in this way has allowed me to make some kind of peace with it. To see it as an opportunity to be generous.
Given how long memory limits freaked me out, I wonder what impact the widespread awareness of the fallibility of memory has on society. It creates a destabilising uncertainty, an uncertainty we often deny due to the importance of memory. But by acknowledging the limits of memory we can confront the fear of how it shifts; see the importance of extending memory where we can; accept the limits where we cannot; and take advantage of the opportunities to be generous that it offers. We can arrive at a far healthier, kinder relationship with these limits once we start being honest about them and their existence.
Recommendations:
If you’ve experienced sexual assault or want to talk anything through based on what’s in this Substack, my email is laurenholtlevine@gmail.com. I’m in no way qualified, but always happy to listen. I’m in a good place about it all, and if I can help people get to a similar stage, it would be an honour - so do feel free to reach out. There’s also an NHS page of resources here.
The account of memory retrieval and storage I took from the Organised Mind by Daniel Levitin. This is a fantastic book about how to cope with information overload, extend your memory and maximise your attention.
The Oliver Sacks book is ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat’. Oliver Sacks is always fun, although I’d start with ‘An Anthropologist On Mars’ (I think it’s better). They are collections of case studies from his work as a psychologist, and it is wild the different things that our brains can do.
There is a very eerie Japanese book called ‘The Memory Police’ by Yoko Ogawa where the police determine what will and won’t be remembered. It’s a very creepy account of forgetting, but a cool read.
Other related Substacks are ‘On Other People’ - the quasi-existence of shared memories, and ‘On Vipassana: Part 2: The Big Thoughts’ about the benefits from this uncertainty.
Whew. A long one. Thank you for reading. Have a great week everybody.
Of all the ways in which self-knowledge may be fostered, perhaps one of the greatest is a person’s ability to discern how they view the past, at every time of life and every age; if that is so, what kind of memory can be ascribed to this girl in the second row? Maybe she has no memory except that of the previous summer, almost bereft of images – the incorporation of a missing body, a man’s.
WATCH MEMENTO