Amid the plethora of qualities I am proud to call my own—the most important of which is humility—is my memory. Because life is all about applying a ‘once burned, twice shy’ mentality, in order to be able to rack up a tally of ‘I told you so’s’ that’s longer than anyone else in life, my memory has become an important part of my ability to win arguments or justify my behaviour.
Y’see, I’m rather paranoid about people taking my ideas and claiming them as their own, and I’m certainly wary of folk accusing me of negative things that are based off misunderstandings or their poor memories. So while perusing the PopSci front page and stumbling across this particular article (http://www.popsci.com.au/2010/08/electrically-stimulating-the-brain-can-boost-visual-memory-110-percent/) about a memory-improvement technique that boosts the memory portion of your brain by stunting other parts, it got me a-thinking.
Memory really isn’t to be trusted as much as I trust it.
If I trace the source of my doubt, it would stretch as far back as when I first watched Christopher Nolan’s brilliant film, Memento. This movie follows the tale of a man (played by Guy Pearce) with a memory-loss condition that means he can’t form new memories. Intrigued by the concept, I watched the behind-the-scenes videos and did a bit of extended research, discovering that faith in memory may well be misplaced.
The notion of eye-witness accounts being called into doubt because of the dubiousness of memory isn’t exactly a novel concept, while our own memories—particularly the validating/justifying varieties I referred to earlier—are often pre-charged with particular overwhelming emotions… and let us never forget that retrospect is a very harsh mistress indeed. Colours can change, details are blurred and when it comes down to a memory vs memory showdown, it’s hard not to wonder if you’re a little crazy, no matter how justified you may have felt going into the disagreement.
And yet we rely so heavily on our memories to define who we are. But what I’m wondering is just how much we can truly trust our subjective recollection of particular events.
What do you all think?
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Human memory is totally fallible, to the extent that an external party could come to you, provide you a few random details and plant a totally false memory in your brain. (http://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm)… so that in itself is a little worrying. But as you pointed out, memories seem to be crucial to the core of our identity - otherwise how do we become the people we are? It’s a question I’ve often pondered, if one’s memory was wiped, would one’s personality be wiped clean too? As though it was constructed purely from memories, or is that an even more fundamental part of who we are? The ultimate ‘tabula rasa’ …Hmmm.
just the other day i saw a car crash. just before the crash i saw a man, getting into the offending car (it was a really stupid accident). The police asked me to describe him, all i could say was ‘he was wearing a beanie, a trashy sweater/jumper and was a bogan’. He said ‘what colour was the beanie’ and i said ‘either green or purple’. I agree, the memory is very, very flawed.
@ Muffin - It’s interesting that you bring up the notion of ‘tabula rasa’ as it’s something that I don’t believe has been properly explored in films that deal with memory loss. There always seems to be this sub-conscious knowledge of the memories or some sort of metaphysical explanation for why people react around someone a certain day (e.g. the soul). But if I am who I am because of what I remember and those memories can be corrupted, changed, forgotten or flat out wrong then it seems a bit problematic considering the onus we put on it of knowing who we are.
@ Dude from Sydney - I very consciously form memories of incidents, conversations or random happenings if I deem them to be important enough to commit to memory. The details are usually negligible, so I think that in your example, what you remembered was a whole lot more than what I would have. In many ways, memory seems to be like TV: it keeps playing regardless of whether we pay attention to/record it, but just because we see it, doesn’t mean we will remember it.