Behind the Scenes of The Brain Show

by Zeev Nitsan

  The myths that were common in Middle Age Europe and were characterized by spectacular deviation from the familiar, such as dragons, giants, and dwarfs, reflect the clear connection between the grotesque and exaggerated to the memorable.

  Memory and Technology

  Externalization of a high volume of information to memory-auxiliary devices, such as palm-top computers, cell phones, and the like, changes long-lasting memory strategies of humankind. In certain cases, students feel there is no need to memorize by heart or learn the multiplication table, or how to read the analog clock, since readily available computers and digital clocks provide the answers quickly and reliably. The question we have to ask ourselves is, can these memory devices be considered our forgetting devices?

  We rely more and more on external memory devices and might lose significant skills of recollection, knowledge and operation. For instance, people who remember telephone numbers by heart mostly belong to the older generation. Nowadays they are referred to as archaic, since the address book in our mobile phones frees us from the burden of remembering telephone numbers. A more complex aspect is reflected in children’s perceptions regarding the need to learn by heart the multiplication table, in light of the user-friendly calculator. We should not consider the aforementioned a Luddite saying (the Luddites were members of a social movement that opposed the industrial revolution in England of the early nineteenth century). Information technology improved human welfare, but at the educational level we should consider the issue of cognitive core skills that should be taught to the next generation, in light of the technological devices that are available to us and become more advanced from day to day.

  Various memory skills are being neglected, since technological devices preserve the information in a friendlier, more reliable manner. We become dependent on these devices, and, in this sense, our memory devices can also be considered our forgetting devices.

  The temporary self is partially a “digital self” in the sense that our computers store an increasingly large part of our private and collective memory. They constitute a type of extension of our brain, or an auxiliary brain for our body. We digitally invoke (on the computer screen, as an example) pieces of information and perception impressions that used to be mentally invoked by our brain.

  Recollection as Rebuilding of Memory

  Recollection is summoning perception impressions documenting a past experience to our consciousness.

  Memory is, in fact, created only at the moment of recollection. Until then, it is just a “potential entity” whose forming requires the art of coordinated and timely interweaving of multiple pieces of information that, together, form the designated memory.

  Memory impressions just lie there, aimlessly, and wait for an opportune moment, which might never come, until they are urgently called, at the time of recollection, to take part in the act of assembling a conscious and unconscious memory experience.

  Memory impressions are scattered in our brain in a cloud that sometimes seems chaotic. The GPS that locates the locations of memory impressions stores the map that enables memory building. Memory impressions spend most of their life in the darkness of unconsciousness. Nevertheless, their impact on our behavior is firm and abiding, even when they are at the unconscious layer.

  Each memory is composed of multiple details that contribute to the recollection of the overall experience. The details’ impressions are scattered across different brain areas, and in each recollection we create new links between them. Sometime not all of them are linked, so the memory is partial and does not reflect everything our brain remembers about the experience.

  Retrieval from memory is a process of restoration and reconstruction.

  Remembering means reconnecting the components of a certain experience.

  The word “remember” contains the secret of memory consolidation, since it is composed of “re” (again) and “member” (component)—in other words, reassembling of the components of an experience and making them available to consciousness.

  Memory is more like restoration than exact reproduction.

  In the process of recollection, we do not throw our fishing rod into the sea of oblivion in order to catch the fish of memory but, rather, create it anew by connecting the fishbone to the tail and the tail to the fin. It seems that there are essential core components that constitute the backbone of memory, and the memory cannot be built without them. When they are found, however, it is easy to reconstruct the entire memory.

  The modularity of memory and its reassembly are essential aspects of the process of recollection.

  Thus, in the midst of recollection, in order to retain the experience true to the original, we should act as if we are archeologists reassembling ancient pottery. We must remember the balance of powers in the memory mix so that, at the time of re-encoding, following recollection, the original balance of powers of the components of the experience is retained. We should be accurate in terms of the dosage of the accompanying emotion and its type, as well as in terms of the sensory inputs that led to the perception of the experience, etc.

  When we bring up memories of our grandmother, we do not activate a single neuron toward which all related memory impressions are channeled—a sort of “grandmother cell,” as some brain researchers believed in the past. In the process of recollection, we trigger an array of neurons netted across different brain areas while each area adds its contribution, such as our grandmother’s voice, the flavor of her dishes, the look of her profile, and the smell of her cookies. It is all done for the purpose of reconstructing our memory of her.

  The retrieval process is an active building process and not a passive gathering from the memories’ archive.

  The retrieval process assembles the perception impressions encoded in our brain into a cohesive memory and pours them into a baking pan that matches common sense according to homogeneous rules such as time and space compatibility and matching other memories encoded in our brain.

  Memory Production Line

  Recollection is mostly managed in a narrative pattern.

  At times of resurrecting a personal memory, a “voluntary activation” of the amygdala (the central generator of emotions in our brain) takes place in order to reproduce the nuances of emotions. Before the frontal lobes inscribe a reality-matching pattern that is loyal to the direction of the time arrow on the perception impressions, while we retrieve them from memory, the perception impressions act like anarchists who do not obey reality testing.

  Only at the retrieval stage are compatibility to reality, rationalism, and correct chronological order inscribed as an added value at the production line of memories.

  “The logic machine” in our brain, whose central part resides at areas of the ventral frontal lobes, matches memories with chronological logic and reality. When its function is disrupted, raw materials, which are illegitimate as memory components in normal times, suddenly become legitimate.

  Acquisition Environment and Recollection Environment

  The importance of reconstructing the acquisition environment, in which the original experience was acquired, as a trigger for recollection, is demonstrated in the story of writer Jean Cocteau in his book Diary of an Anonymous. In this book, he describes his return to the street in which he spent his childhood. He regains his childhood habit and drags his hand along stone fences, gates and bushes that encircled the line of front yards of the houses in the street of his childhood. The sequence of textures that “flowed” through the palm of his hand does not trigger anything, however. Then he realizes that, as a child, his height was shorter. He bends to a child’s height and drags his hand again along the various objects that encircled the front yards, and all of a sudden the memories come back magically. Just as the needle moves across the bumps of old vinyl records, the melody of his childhood came back to life through the palm of his hand, and he rediscovered the texture of his schoolbag, the names of his friends and teachers, his grandfather’s voice, the smell of his grandfather�
��s clothes, etc.

  Reconstruction of the environment in which the experience was acquired is a very powerful retrieval cue for resurrecting its memory.

  There are crooked paths, like goat paths in the mountains, and, alternately, fast highways between the stimulus and the memory it evokes. Dragging one’s hand on the wall at a “childish height” constituted the fast lane to memory—a lane compatible to the acquisition environment in the childhood. A journey to memory in which one walks in different lanes that are not compatible to the acquisition environment is often winding, and slower, and sometimes involves getting lost and not reaching the desired memory destination.

  Matching the recollection environment to the acquisition environment is also the mechanism that stands behind the attempt to reconstruct the stages of a crime by the suspects at the crime scene.

  The emotional environment also affects recollection; events that a person experiences at a certain emotional state will be better remembered at a similar emotional state.

  “Instrumental memory” considers an inanimate object as containing a living memory. In a poetic spirit, some might claim that Cocteau’s memory was kept inside the stone fences, the bushes, and the gates, like the musician who asked his friend if he wanted him to play a famous melody since it was waiting at that moment inside his guitar. Or, as an optional exercise for guitar players: let your guitar remember your music for you; imagine that your instrument of expression absorbs your thoughts.

  The Resolution of Recollection

  We are capable of performing a memory bounce, in the sense of skipping between various levels of resolutions of the experience’s registration: recalling the overall experience or focusing on the small details that compose the entire memory. Recollection of a loved one may include, for instance, the memory of his voice, his profile, typical phrases he used, and the typical emotional imprint he used to leave on us—in other words, perception representations that are mapped in mental maps at different brain areas.

  Each time we recall a personal memory, our consciousness focuses on a single detail out of the entire recalled experience and it “fills the screen momentarily.” The overall detailed experience is played in the background, however, and other details show up and fill the screen of consciousness in matching timing according to the order in our memory narrative.

  A memory of an experience is often the averaging, or a merger, of similar experiences.

  During each recollection the experience impressions are re-encoded and redesigned. Recollections are sometimes “hybrid products.” Most of the time, we will remember “averaging” of experiences of similar nature—not a single chess game with our grandfather, but several games played with him whose shared impression is merged in our memory, unless a certain game involved unique characteristics with a personal touch that made it particularly rememberable.

  We spent about nine months in the eighth grade. If we challenge our brain to come up with memories from this period, we will sketch the “outline” of the experiences remembered from this period, recall extreme experiences (extraordinary events from this period), and, on the whole, we will work out an average of the experience and the average emotional soundtrack that accompanied the experience of being an eighth grader.

  The relationship between time and memory are complicated. As time goes by, the image of memory fades away. Similar to a figure that stands close to us in space and we are able to notice its minute details, so it is in the case of a memory that is close in time. And, similar to a figure that stands far away from us, and its details are blurred, so is the case of a past memory whose impressions have faded out. We tend to remember the recent past and imagine the near future in much more concrete terms compared to remembering the remote past and imagining the distant future. A memory of the remote past is sometimes like an apple that shows the teeth marks of time.

  Encoding and Formation of Memories

  The Actuarial Science of Memories

  The frequency of using memory is the main actuarial indicator of its survival. Its emotional weight is another actuarial indicator, which depends mostly on the level of the arousal of the amygdala linked to the perception impressions experience that becomes a memory. A stimulation of the amygdala is like a stimulating drug in the marathon race of our memory toward the finishing line of the anagram.

  Thus, we can claim that the intensity of our memories is mostly determined according to two components: the frequency of use and the emotional soundtrack that accompanies them—in other words, the level of vibration of the amygdala’s strings.

  Emotional intensity is a significant prognostic component in terms of the life expectancy of memories and of the level of compatibility to the reality in which it is encoded. During an event that inducts an extraordinary emotional reaction, we mostly encode the various aspects of the experience with accuracy that exceeds standards events. But it seems that it is an “on-the-verge situation,” since, beyond a certain verge of emotional charge, the emotional turmoil might compromise the quality of the encoding.

  In “healthy” dosages, stress might blow wind into the sails of recollection.

  It is a challenging arousal, since it is a sort of “healthy stress.” Adrenaline in a certain “dosage window” might assist in focusing attention. On the other hand, excess dosages of stress (and adrenaline) will make it difficult for us to encode the impressions of the experience and to retrieve them at the recollection stage.

  The “exposure shutter” of our memory camera determines the quality of the experience photos. Prolonged exposure usually results in deeper traces of memory.

  The environmental conditions at the time the information is acquired are environmental noises, lighting, temperature on site—all of these factors affect the quality of the input from the senses.

  A failure in the function of sensory organs, such as dysosmia (disruption of smell) or dysgeusia (disruption of taste), dims and distorts the face of experience. A disrupted input might lead to a disrupted, partial memory like a patchwork quilt of memories sewn in crude stitches.

  The basic worldview of the observer also affects directly and indirectly his perception of reality.

  The relevance coefficient for us is another important actuarial indicator. The more the information is relevant to our current situation, the more priority it gets in terms of processing and input by means of focusing our attention on it and shifting our attention from phenomena that are not as relevant.

  Present tasks that share similarities with past tasks will be encoded more easily. Once a complex mental skill is acquired, similar skills will be acquired more easily (“more of the same”). The brain will use the neural network of coordinates that is already in place in a modular status in order to encode the new task.

  Our brain is better at remembering a sequence of events that are linked in a causal manner than a random sequence of events. The directionality of the arrow of causality signals the direction of recollection, draws its outline, and facilitates its formation.

  We are all anxious about the fading away of memories of precious moments and try to commemorate them by external documentation means, hoping to retain the intensity of emotions we experienced at a certain moment, which naturally decreases as years go by. It can explain our need to document precious moments by taking pictures of them. In this sense, we are all similar to Leonardo, a character from the film Memento, who tattooed information on his skin for fear it might fade away.

  Aspects of Memory Functions Enhancement Methods

  Sometimes the ripples of memory softly touch the shore of consciousness, and the encounter creates the recollection. At other times, it seems that breakwaters as high as dams stand between the sea of memories and the shoreline of consciousness and prevent any encounter between them.

  In a situation in which certain information that we know exists in our brain refuses to float to our consciousness when we need it, we might choose to act according to the approach that says “let the brain be a brain�
�� and not expect that all phases (and not even most of them) of problem solution will take place at the conscious layer. Apparently solutions are cooked in various layers of our consciousness. When the memory of a certain detail does not float to consciousness when we want it to, as in a case of a word we cannot utter but feel at the tip of our tongue, a common approach is not to insist on bringing it to the conscious layer here and now. Such insistence often does not yield the desirable results. Instead, according to the “let the brain be a brain” approach, we should stop searching and allow “thinking time” for the unconscious layers of thinking. This insight is reflected in one of José Saramago’s sayings, “Answers do not always come when we need them, and many times the need to simply wait for them is the only possible answer.”

  This approach sometimes leads to the desirable result—the exposure of the rebellious piece of information that is finally found in the dark cellars of memory. As with the Phoenix—the legendary bird that goes up in flames after five hundred years and is reborn out of the ashes—so do memories that seem to be forgotten often come up from the ashes of oblivion.

  Retrieval Clues

  Retrieval clues help in resurrecting ancient memories. Sometimes they serve as a hidden door that leads to the cellar of forgotten memories and improve our ability to skillfully leaf through the pages of our memoir.

  “All roads lead to…” It is possible to reach a memory from different paths: its emotional charge (i.e., the emotions that were involved in it); its configurational features; sensory aspects that were involved in it; and, sometimes, external memory assistants such as old pictures.

  “The hinting intensity” of the retrieval clues depends on their nature.