Memory in General - What Have We Learned? Part I

What does it mean to have a good memory? It can mean that we have a capacious recollection of events, spontaneously recalling incidents and details that others who were there do not, or remember only if they are cued by reminders. It can mean that we are seldom absent-minded, never forgetting appointments or where we left our glasses. Some people who say they have a good memory have acres of learned material so that they know a topic intimately, even if they do not recall the instances when they picked up the material. Some are good at names and faces. We might mean that we can pull events from our deep past better than others. Andrew Jackson could remember read text verbatim, which was useful when discussing a piece of proposed legislation where some previous written versions had been lost in the course of debate. CS Lewis used to impress his new students early by asking them to pull a book frm his library while his back was turned and read a line from it without saying what it was. He would then say where the book was, its title, and where in the text the quote occurred. Impressive enough. But he would then continue the quote as long as amused him, to the end of the book word for word if necessary. Some pitchers can remember every inning and every pitch of their career*, and some fans show a similar recall. "It was a 2-2 count, one out. Javier had already gone 1 for 3 that day with a loud out to centerfield..."

These memory abilities have some association, but little more than all cognitive abilities do with g-factor in general. People can have enormous learning but be absent-minded. Others might keep little record of even their own past experiences and don't necessarily enjoy getting together with cousins or classmates to compare notes, but have prodigious memories for telephone numbers or lists of parts from the catalogs of the companies they order from. 

Memory can even be too good, when we can't get rid of an intrusive thought - the last song we heard (especially if we did not hear it to the end, BTW), a trauma from years ago, an unresolved argument that is now unimportant. 

One of my sons recalled the Thanksgiving that I had made multiple plum pies. I rejected this outright. Peeling plums and putting them in a pie is an event so unusual that I would certainly remember it. I knew I had never done that thing. Yet other family members chimed in, also recalling the year I had made not one, but two plum pies. Ridiculous. That never happened. Not until someone googled plum pies and saw that this nearly always referred to including a layer of plum jam, not plums themselves did it all fit together. "That does sound familiar, actually. One of them included a layer of chocolate..."  

We forget things all the time, and a good thing, too. Very few of us need to remember last Wednesday's weather.  It is good to remember where we usually put the car keys, and the special exception today of putting them somewhere else, but once we have the keys and are moving to the car the information is no longer valuable. Letting it go is efficient. It really is true that one thing pushes out another, as Sherlock Holmes believed - though he took it to an unnecessary extreme, as usual. Absent-mindedness, it turns out, is partly a matter of intentionality, but also an overall drive to simplification in our lives. When we live alone this are misplaced less often, because only one person is touching them. People with four children have more to juggle than those with one. I could keep all the relevant information in my head for a caseload of fifteen people at my peak - their diagnosis, family phone numbers, dates of birth and admission, addresses, community contact, etc. When I hit sixteen I had to start writing them down - and not just the additional ones. The whole list needed to be put in written form now, which took a great deal more time, and everything was less efficient. My maximum decreased in the last few years, partly because more information was needed on each, but I could tell I was also less able. 11-12 was my max at the end. 

Yet some of this "forgotten" material can be retrieved by cue. "I hadn't thought of that dock at Aunt Cynthia's camp in years, but you're right. It was flippin' dangerous! Why did they ever let children go out and play on that thing?" Last Wednesday's weather is probably irrelevant forever, but there is a chance you might need to recall it, to help recall another event. "That was the day the truck broke down. Do you remember which towing company we called first?"

Yet beyond that are things that are truly forgotten, lost beneath the waves forever. A roomful of people supplying helpful reminders availeth naught. That Psych 101 film of the neurosurgeon touching the guy's brain, causing him to "remember" and event and start talking about it, was inaccurate. Researchers at the time made the assumption of videographic memory without realising it. They concluded it was an actual memory, unlocked by the stimulation. "There was a guy coming through the fence..." In reality, it was more likely created on the spot because of the more random associations with that tiny brain-spot. Memory is more like a computer, reassembling the data each time, with danger of slight changes. Even worse, we are not remembering the original event repeatedly. Unless corrected for (with a photograph or a letter, perhaps), we are recalling the last recollection. You don't have everything that ever happened to you stored in your brain in some vast cinematic catalogue. What you have is a remarkable ability to reassemble memories from very few cues.

Trauma and emotion affect recall. Emotional associations, both positive and negative, increase the chances that an event will be recalled at all. This is why it is surprising, even alarming, when people forget things that seem like they should be central. It raises the possibility that they needed to forget it for some reason. It seems a move away from wholeness. Yet I have my own third son as example against this. He suffered terrible neglect and abuse, and recently exclaimed to his brother "We had an aunt?" Even the rest of the family met her on our one joint trip to Romania, and remembered her. And he is mind-bogglingly well-adjusted.

 *In contrast to someone like Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd, who would shrug and say "I just go out and throw."

No memory.