Memory

(go on, say it)

I have been reading a number of books about the way our brains work, and it does make you think about memory and memories and how they are created and what they really represent in our brains.

One striking thing that I do notice is that people who were in the same place at the same time can have very different memories about what it was like. Whether it is your childhood home, your school or one of your workplaces, you can often find that one person there remembered it in a particular way and another person had a diametrically-opposed view (of the same events). It can apply to your memories of a person too: the colleague who seemed 'really easy to get on with' to you might be the same person who was seen as a 'massive pain in the arse' by another person.

So how can we account for this? How does one child remember warmth and love and another remembers coldness and antipathy? How does one colleague have the direct opposite of your memory of someone else in your workplace?

Well there is the old saying 'Different strokes for different folks'. It could be that the things about someone you liked were just what they didn't like. But that seems a bit of a stretch if they have quite different memories of someone's behaviour. It's not that they can't agree on matters of taste with you; it's that they can't agree on matters of fact.

Another explanation could be the role of emotion. Our feelings are so intimately tied up with our memories (think of a great day from your childhood and the dominant aspect is the greatness of it rather than what you did; the feelings rather than the facts) that in some ways the emotions lead the memory. The exact same events and gestures can be remembered in very different ways if your emotions lead them that way. And, rather sadly, I have to admit that if it is true for a negative interpretation, it is as true for a positive ones; if you remember your school as wonderful, maybe it is just because you are an inveterate Polyanna (guilty as charged..)

And turning from the fact that you can have wildly different recall of the same things, let us think of how different the substance of our memories can be. Specifically, some people remember much earlier events or remember much more detail of things that happened. I cannot really find any memories which I can reliably pin earlier than about the age of four. Cro could remember provable details of when her brother was born, when she was less than one-and-a-half. Other people can remember clear details of even younger events. 

Although I don't have very early memories, I do retain strangely detailed memories of things from my later childhood and adult life. The names of former classmates and colleagues pop up after gaps of forty or fifty years. I remember the names of places we stayed one night in the late 70s. I remember Russian vocabulary I learned at the age of 14. It's not systematic or complete, but it shows there is a lot of stuff in there (at the back, where the cobwebs are....)

There are even people who have, whether by choice or accident, a much greater ability to remember things. There are many doubts about the veracity of 'photographic memory' or 'eiditic memory' but in the latter there are respectable studies that show maybe 2% of young children can 'see' a memory of an object after it has been removed, and can describe details of it by 'looking' at the mental image. There are also people who have trained their memory through mnemonics to be able to remember huge swathes of text or numbers or facts. So at the very least, the natures of our memories and memorising process are not identical. 

There are also quite special difference in the types of things that we can all remember well. In a welcome gift from our brains, it seems that most people cannot actually remember physical pain as a thing, but we can remember smells very well. Or at least when we do re-smell something from our past (like the smell of the stock-cupboard in our primary school classroom, or the smell of the wash-cellar where Daddy left the geraniums over winter) we are immediately back in the time and place. 

But the clearest fact seems to be that when we remember something, we remember a whole package. It is not just the feeling of walking through the door of your childhood house; it is the smell of the carpet, the feel of the doorhandle, the memory of the school day you were likely returning from, the smell of something cooking, and the feeling of being back home. It seems to me that any single aspect of that memory necessarily triggers all the others, and emotions - for good or for ill - are at the heart of it.