I recently read a moving post on memory by Dawn Foster that set me thinking.
Dawn has epilepsy which means that 20-40 times each day she misses a few seconds of what is going on – yet nobody notices. She finds it disturbing especially when compared to the experiences she has had with her grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s. The thing that struck me was the phrase “I worry constantly about how much we remember.” This made me think of the suffering that even the thought that one might not remember something can create.
My mother had a ‘perfect’ memory right up until the end of her life. I take this as a great blessing because for much of my life I had someone who was certain they could remember almost everything whilst my memory was incredibly fickle and would constantly play tricks on me. The blessing was bestowed when, at some forgotten point in time, I realised that both of us had very similar powers of memory. Mum was just more confident in asserting that she was right. She would declare something to have happened and, because there was often no way of knowing otherwise, it may as well have been that way – someone had moved the car keys and if she was alone in the house she quickly dismissed the incident.
What this part of my relationship with my mother taught me was that your attitude to your memory is more important than what you remember. As I got into bed after another long day and yielded to the wonderful sensation of pillow, sheets and duvet it occurred to me that I have got into this same bed over 6,000 times. How many of those can I recall? I could say none or all. They merge into a feeling of getting into my own bed. Does it bother me that I can’t remember probably 5,900+ times I have done something significant to my life – no. Yet some memories do bother me. What year did my father die? What is the anniversary of my mother’s death? What was my grandfather’s name? How callous that I get them wrong when they are so fundamental to my life – to my identity.
This is the crux of it – identity. To forget ourselves is synonymous with death.
I believe most people work on the basis that they are their personal histories. When we find contradictions between memory and our present reality we are literally wounded and we feel pain. Fortunately we fudge over inconsistencies to avoid the pain. Dawn’s missing moments are an example of this happening within a clinical condition but it is common for all of us.
I just read a wonderful book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman where the author summarises our internal mental processes in terms of two systems. System 1 is unconscious, fast and simply serves up options to System 2 which is our reasoning mind. The cocktail party effect, where you pick out your name being mentioned across a crowded room, is an example of how System 1 monitors everything and only tells you (System 2) about what is relevant. (There is much more to this and I recommend the book.) Memory is a System 1 process. You think “Where are the car keys” and you just know. The “just know” is System 1 going off and fetching that information for you.
System 1 maintains this flow of ideas and thoughts to your conscious mind to maintain the sense of a coherent self and it will create ‘false’ memories and make up excuses if necessary. It basically tells you what you what is needed to support the view of yourself you have.
In Buddhism there is the notion of the Seed Consciousness (ālayavijñāna) which is very similar. Stimuli (which may include our own thoughts as well as external prods) trigger seeds in our subconscious store house to germinate and bear fruit in our conscious mind. The contents of the store govern how we see the world. The task of meditative practice is to purify the store house so that it contains more flower seeds than weed seeds. Everything starts coming up roses!
Now for the scary stuff. You don’t remember most stuff – like the umpteen thousand times you have cleaned your teeth – and your System 1 will seamlessly imagine things to fill the cracks should you need to remember something that is no longer available or perhaps never happened – just like with my mother. The danger is that consider yourself a forgetful person and System 1 starts pointing out all the cracks just to prove you right – like it did with me.
Now for the cool stuff. Because your attitude governs how you remember and what you remember governs how you interpret the world by changing your attitude now you can actually change everything: past, present and future. It sounds crazy but think it through. If you work to change how you habitually react in the present moment then you change the past. Not physically. You won’t suddenly find that you won the lottery five years ago but you will remember more positive things and see the positive side of things you had thought negative.
One of the experiments that Daniel Kahneman mentions in his book really strikes me. They got people to fill in a questionnaire that assessed two things: their current mental state and an assessment of their lives so far. The trick came in that they asked each participant to photocopy a sheet of paper before filling in the questionnaire. For half the people there was a small value coin left on the photocopier and for the other half their wasn’t. Not surprisingly the half that found the coin were recorded as being in a better mood but they also gave a better assessment of their past lives. Placing a coin on a photocopier had changed how these people felt about their past. I would say it had actually changed their pasts because so much of the emotional content of the past can only exist in memory.