by Zeev Nitsan
We add part of our worldview and part of ourselves to each of our memories, even if it is done unconsciously. Each memory is, to some extent, in our image.
The hippocampus, which is essential for the creation of long-term memories, is a private mint that produces coins with our personal portrait on them.
“The Rashomon phenomenon” refers to the facts of the same event as they are reflected in the memory of different people who witnessed it. Often the facts are reflected in their memory in different, even contradictory, versions.
In this sense, reality is “in the eyes of the beholder” and does not have “universal validity.” This phenomenon raises questions regarding the ability to perceive reality as it is (the event itself) and reinforces the feeling that each memory is, to some extent, in the image of the person who remembers it.
Memory and Emotions
As time goes by and we draw farther away from a certain event, the sounds of the accompanying emotional soundtrack become weaker and vaguer. What is left is a type of aphorismic extraction of the experience.
The concealed emotional mark of the components of the experience that do not reach consciousness pours its impressions into the cocktail whose averaging constitutes the emotional mark of the overall experience. The averaging weights the contribution of the components of the experience from the conscious and unconscious layers.
Invoking a past experience and raising it to the conscious layer sometimes triggers experience-compatible emotions, and, in fact, we retreat to our “emotional past” while living the experience in real time. Restoration of the emotional climate through recollection inducts a similar emotional climate in the present, thus the “lapse in time” that allows the recollection.
The Hippocampus–Amygdala Duet
As alcohol content in alcoholic beverages varies, our memories carry various levels of emotional content with them. The amygdala is the main bartender who pours emotions into memories. Memories that contain emotional components rely on a functional duet that includes the brain areas of the hippocampus and the amygdala, combined as central components.
Our personal memory is characterized by the resurrection of the original soundtrack that accompanied the experience when it was etched in our brain. The amygdala allows for the resurrection of the activity pattern formed in it when the brain “met” the original perception impressions of the remembered event.
The Dial of Emotions
We experience our life as a narrative continuum embedded with “high amplitude events” in terms of emotional lurch. These events leave more prominent records compared to routine events, which are mostly “flat-amplitude.”
Numerous studies have shown that we remember information (such as from photos) that triggers strong emotions better than information that leaves us emotionally indifferent. Moreover, memories that trigger negative emotions are encoded at a more detailed level compared to memories that trigger positive emotions; they serve as warning signposts.
Thus, for example, behavioral skill acquired by rats in a stressful condition proved to be extremely resistant to eradication and became almost a “non-erasable imprinting.”
Some claim that exceptional events, in terms of the emotional lurch they induct, are recorded in the “body memory” as well as in our brain—this is reflected in muscle pains, abnormal heartbeats and a tsunami of adrenaline—as a mute engraving etched in body tissues, which is claimed to be retrievable and verbally conceptualized by specific methods of therapy. On the other hand, some argue that this claim is just romantic, wishful thinking that lacks factual support.
The Emotional Prism of Memories
Recollection is the invoking of past impression. It has the power of reconstructing serenity in moments of turmoil, and, on the other hand, it allows us to dig in the exhausted pile of an emotional memory whose flames once touched the clouds.
Sadness is a mood in which we are likely to “visit the land of memories” and leaf through emotion-triggering memories recordings within the book of the heart.
The emotional value of memories is reflected facing the flames. It is a known fact that many people whose house went up in fire chose to save their photo albums and other items containing memories first.
Aspects of Memory Failures
The old insight that the strength of a chain is measured according to its weakest link is also true with respect to mental functioning: some people are prone to failures in memory assimilation, some to failures related to maintenance of memory, and some to failures related to retrieval.
An overall deletion of memory contents almost never occurs when the person is conscious.
In certain extreme situations, events that cause strong emotional lurch, such as traumatic events, are not encoded in memory, or are encoded in a thin pattern that requires great effort in order to resurrect the memory; thus, the product might be only partially reliable.
Our memory contains past effect impressions that continue to exist in present. Each recollection leads afterward to re-encoding and, thus, the danger of “blurring the original.”
“Changing of the judgment backward” is like diverting the river of memories to a certain direction, which is different from the real course, due to new information that dims the reality-compatible information the memory contained in the first place.
For example, the way a person perceives himself in the present greatly affects the way he remembers his old self.
The level of reassurance regarding the reliability of our memories and, alternatively, the level of reliability we ascribe to information that conflicts with our memory, determines to what extent we are prone to “changing of the judgment backward.”
One of the reasons people tend to underestimate it is related to slips of memory in old age. As we grow older, the load of tasks and information on the shoulders of our memory systems becomes heavier. The load of insights accumulated by our brain becomes heavier, and the act of navigating among them, as in a thick forest, becomes more and more difficult.
What’s Your Name?
The most embarrassing memory failure, in many cases, is failing to remember people’s names. A plausible explanation for that is that such a failure shames the person who forgot in the presence of others. The aspect of publicity intensifies the distress. A failure that is not exposed to the public, such as a grocery item we wanted to buy but forgot all about, lacks the embarrassing public aspect.
H.M.—Prisoner of the Eternal Present
There is a macabre cliché according to which the science of medicine develops from one funeral to the next. Similarly, brain science was also developed as a result of studying tragic cases.
The case of the person who has been known in scientific literature for many years only by his initials—H. M.—has become a milestone in the search of the golden fleece of understanding the formation of memory. Henry Molaison was nine years old when he fell off his bike. He was badly injured and started to suffer epileptic seizures that involved frequent loss of consciousness, which greatly disrupted his quality of life. At the time, medical treatment was insufficient and did not help him much. In 1953, at the age of twenty-seven, he underwent an operation in an attempt to better his condition and remove the rebellious brain tissue that caused the epileptic seizures. During the operation he underwent bilateral amputation of the hippocampi and adjacent structures at the middle layer of the temporal lobes on both sides of the brain. In many senses, H. M.’s soul was imprisoned that afternoon of September 1, 1953, while he was undergoing surgery through which both his hippocampi were removed. Once they were removed, the gate of his memory kingdom was locked to any new information.
Following the operation—once his mind was distracted, and the immediate perception impressions were washed away by the waves of a new experience—the recordings of the previous experience were deleted for good.[27]
The worldview, as it was reflected from his brain, was an island of the consciousness of the present, which was eradicated and recr
eated from one moment to the next and was surrounded by a sea of eternal oblivion. Following each blink of the eye, he perceived a whole new world. H. M. lost big parts of his past (and his future) but involuntarily received a place of honor in the pantheon of brain research. His tragic case clarified the critical importance of the hippocampus in terms of assimilation of new information and its encoding as a long-term memory.
Pseudo Memories
“Merging of false memories” is a phenomenon in which false memories are created based on structuring the memory backward, which means gathering pieces of information about a certain event after it occurred and merging it into personal biography in retrospect. Often there is a real, factual basis for the memory, but, since it was constructed as a patch quilt, certain patches are “false patches.” Sometimes they are connected to the “factual patches” in crude stitches that are easy to identify, but sometimes they are sewn as if by an artist, mostly inadvertently, and thus more difficult to distinguish. It might occur while creating a recording of an experience out of real, direct experience recordings and perception impressions mediated from other sources of information, which were not directly experienced by the self, such as photographs and family stories. Thus, when sewing the quilt of memories, we must be very careful and try to distinguish between real patches and false ones.
A reliable memory is supposed to match the memories that interface with it in terms of time and place. In case the details of the memories are incompatible, “memory dissonance” is created and a review process is formed, which “straightens” the memories’ impressions according to a chosen outline.
A false memory is sometimes as accurate an imitator as a glittering zircon.
“I am sure it was like that, but reality thinks otherwise.” The level of subjective sureness, with regard to the truthfulness of memory details, is not a reliable measure of its truthfulness.
Incorrect memories share brain areas with real memories; this is the reason subjects feel that these incorrect memories truly reflect past reality. It is similar to imaginary “thinking images” that share the same brain areas that are activated when we observe real visual input.
A memory that includes many pieces of information that are based on sensory input is likely to reflect a real experience. There are exceptions to this heuristic rule, however.
Induction of False Memory
It is possible to create a false memory so that the person who remembers it is entirely certain of its truthfulness. An example is in the case of a list of words that are related to the familiar context of the “target word,” which is not included in the list.
Words such as “tire,” “steering wheel,” and “gear stick” were read to subjects who were later asked whether the word “car” was included in the original list. Most subjects said it was, indeed, included in the list. The words related to cars made the subjects prone to making the mistake. They assumed that the word that is related to the context of the words they heard was also read to them. The memory drained into the drainage basin of the word “car,” although this word was never mentioned explicitly.
Sometimes our memory tends to distort under the bending arms of imagination, like a spoon in the hands of a magician.
It is known that a person who is familiar with the secrets of the soul is capable of inflicting on another person, mostly inadvertently, persuasion and even a false sense of truthfulness with respect to false “past experiences” that did not actually occur. It can be done by means of suggestion methods such as hypnosis, age regression, trance induction, and guided imagery. According to memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus, even the most subtle suggestion affects memory.[28]
Testimony
Memory and truth sometimes meet and sometimes walk in parallel paths. In other words, memory sometimes aspires to reach truth as in centripetal attraction, but at other times it moves around it, not touching it, as in a centrifugal course. In between, there are numerous situations across the spectrum, on the ends of which total truth and total falsehood reside.
The Rashomon phenomenon, which was mentioned earlier, is named after the famous 1950 film by the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. The film describes the different versions of a description of the same event as they are reported by the different people who witnessed the event. Rashomon is an example of competitive narratives, and it is a daily phenomenon in our lives. The importance of this phenomenon is intensified in court rulings, which are mainly based on testimonies of witnesses with regard to specific events.
The probative weight of testimonies of different people should reflect the limits of human memory in general and the specific limitations of the witnesses.
In many cases, the witness expresses his beliefs, in the sense of ideas and insights that have already taken root in his brain, and those are merged in the goblet of facts as he experienced and witnessed them in a type of alchemy.
Thus, the great difference between versions is not due to the mere facts that are reflected from the witness’s consciousness but, rather, his beliefs and perceptions that are added into the goblet of his memory.
We tend to preserve the generic perceptual impression of an experience, which is formed from the collection of details and the relations between them. It is a type of holistic pattern that we remember better than each of the details separately. When composing a facial composite, however, the witness is required to dive into the depths of his memory into the “abyss of small details.”
The number of facial components in the reservoir used for composing suspects’ facial composites is about 560, from which sixty-three billion different facial composites can be composed.
Witnesses might fall into the trap of relative judgment. A general impression of “familiarity” might lead them to identify a person who shares the most similar characteristics with the figure planted in their memory as the figure itself.
Wide gaps between the acquisition environment and the retrieval environment will make the process of recalling and following the trail of elusive memory through channeling clues more difficult.
Exceptional Memory Skills
Under the Wings of Hypermnesia (Enhanced Recall)
The paths of human culture are embedded with wondrous memory performances. Folk singers from northern and southern Europe sang and recited their songs by heart. Homer caused wonders by remembering the lines of The Iliad.
In Islamic tradition, a person who memorizes all 114 chapters of the Koran is called a Hafiz, which means “guard.” An ancient Indian tantric drill trains the trainees to give two written speeches at once, orally, one sentence from each of the speeches at a time. As practice advances, the number of topics the trainee is required to talk about simultaneously rises.
Solomon Shereshevskii, who had extraordinary memory and who was discussed in a book by the Russian neurologist Alexander Luria, The Mind of a Mnemonist,[29] demonstrated incomprehensible memory capacities—capacities that can be attributed, at least partially, to the synesthesia (merging of the senses) he suffered from (or was blessed with?).
After he had heard a list of words, Shereshevskii recalled more than seventy words accurately (an average person recalls five to nine words in similar conditions). He said that, at the phase of assimilating the information, his thoughts wander the familiar streets of Moscow and he “scatters” the words among the familiar sites. At the stage of recollection, he goes back in his mind to those streets and “picks up” the pieces of information from the sites he anchored them to.
Shereshevskii’s memories were characterized by exceptional accuracy and vividness, but it seems that, at a certain point, his brain collapsed under the weight of his exceptionally detailed memories. Toward the end of his life, he wrote down many of his memories and then set them on fire with a metaphoric hope that they would evaporate from his brain as well.
Among children who suffer from autism, there were a few who were found to be able to say the exact weekday on which each one of the days in the recent centu
ry took place.
Genius is reflected as an oasis in the midst of a desert of limitations in the case of the British painter Stephen Wiltshire, who was diagnosed as an autist. In his case, the hypermnesia is reflected as an amazingly accurate photographic memory. Stephen puts on paper detailed urban sceneries accurately after having observed them only once. He has a particularly high level of iconic memory skills.
Brad Williams, a radio announcer from Wisconsin, sails in his memory to the seashores of his childhood, and the sailing log in his brain is amazingly accurate. His memory of past events was compared to archival documentation and was found about 90 percent accurate.
Jill Price from the United States also demonstrated unbelievable recall performance. Her performance was limited to defined fields of interest, however. One of those fields is her personal life. In her fifties she played on the strings of her memory the unique past melody of each day of her life from the age of fourteen. Another field in which she excels is the history of television shows and aerial accidents. Her mastery of the details is wondrous and draws the outline of human memory: accurate and detailed memory abilities are not comprehensive but focus on fields of interests, to which numerous “brain hours” were dedicated.
Magnus Carlsen from Norway, who is called “the Mozart of Chess” and who won the title World Chess Champion before the age of twenty-three, demonstrated superior memory performance as a child. It was said, for example, that at the age of two he remembered all the car brands he had seen. At the age of four he remembered the names of almost all 430 municipalities in Norway, including their symbols and number of citizens. During his legendary career, he played against ten competitors simultaneously with his back to the chess board, not seeing the location of the 320 pieces on the chess board (in each game of chess, each player has sixteen pieces; thirty-two pieces on the whole) and relying solely on his memory for virtual demonstration of the location of the pieces on the board and for giving instructions as to how to move them accordingly until he won the games.
