Why does our memory fail?
How what we remember and what we forget shape the story of who we are
A man with a beret
I was five years old when my grandfather died. For years, I held onto this memory of him wearing his beret, overlooking the dirt courtyard where the chickens roamed free. The house was torn down to make way for a soulless apartment building, and the chickens disappeared (where did they go?).
One day, I came across an old photo of him standing at the top of the stairs and realized my mistake: that «memory» was a copy-paste from that photograph.
How do we forget?
Memory is a bit dramatic. In our brain, neurons fire in sequence and create a pattern of electrical activity; then they release neurotransmitters, such as dopamine or serotonin, that will bind to other neurons, creating synapses and strengthening that pattern.
Our brains are physically changed by memories, creating pathways that can be triggered by anything from a thought to the smell of wrapping paper.
But things can go wrong when we try to access a memory.
If this was a happily-ever-after romance novel, the amnesia would be brought up by an injury: a car accident in a snow storm right outside a small town. But in real life we usually forget because the pattern fades by lack of use, because the memory wasn’t properly recorded in the first place (maybe we weren’t paying attention), or because something interferes with the recollection.
The monthly budget
I used to help my mother navigate our home’s monthly budget. We would go through expenses and income and try to figure out how to stretch the money. I remember feeling proud because she counted on me to do this with her, even if I was just a child. I also remember the feeling of uneasiness, of fear, from the realization that we lived from paycheck to paycheck, on an edge that my mother would push every single month.
A few years ago, in therapy, I learned the concept of parentification, and it hit me like a storm. Many memories with my mother, like doing the monthly budget, gained a new meaning, a new layer of interpretation: I was not mature for my age, I was asked to perform a role.
This realization altered my memories. Like in the movie Inside Out, when the yellow happy memories become tinted with the blue sadness.
Our memory, the pattern in our brain, is reconstructed every time it’s accessed, and sometimes, something interferes with that reconstruction. We add or subtract details, or mix in new information, such as my grandfather’s photograph or the concept of parentification.
Why do we forget?
Our imperfect recollection mechanism has evolutionary advantages. Forgetting allows the brain to make new connections and to not get lost on details, or the past.
We make decisions without having to weigh all the data from every moment of our lives. We update outdated information and adapt. We connect information in creative ways. We (sometimes) are able to recover from trauma. Women (sometimes) want to give birth to more than one child.
We forget, we lose the connections we don’t use and no longer need.
We are shaped by what we remember (and what we forget)
I have had enough conversations with my brother to realise that, even though we grew up in the same house with the same parents, our childhood memories feature very different situations and emotional soundtracks. For each of us, the stories we remember are real, and they shape who we are today.
What we remember impacts the choices we make, how we feel about things, how we act when someone cuts in line when we are already late.
But what we forget can also, unconsciously, influence our actions and emotions: even when the pathways to memories disappear or are weakened, our brain structures may keep records of emotional responses around certain triggers (a.k.a. implicit memory).
(And just by chance, I was reading Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin, and came across this sentence: «The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.»)
Our forgotten experiences become part of the subtext of our lives, driving us while we seek escape or expression.
If the story that shapes our identity is this arbitrary brew of text and subtext, it begs the question: are we writing it?
Can we choose what to remember?
There is no magic spell that helps us remember (I wish), but there are techniques that help us strengthen the memory patterns.
There is no magic spell that allows us to choose what we forget (the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind explores this in a beautiful way), but there are techniques that help us weaken memory patterns, give them new meanings, and manage their impact.
So we «choose», up to a point.
Lists, records, and calendar reminders are my best friends at work. I take Omega-3 fish oil and do sudoku.
Looking at photos helps me remember and reinforce patterns associated with people and shared memories.
I’ve been to therapy and I write about my experiences, trying to create a distance.
When meeting someone, I aggressively try to pay attention and repeat their name, hoping to create a strong record before it evaporates two seconds later. I fail many, many times. Sorry, «John».
Last week I read (I can’t remember where...) about a child looking at the landscape passing by the window of a train and trying to capture everything she saw so she could form a perfect memory, and I recognised myself. I am often struck by a kind of grief, the feeling that the present moment will be forever lost in my faulty synapses.
I chose the words «paying attention to life» as the motto for this publication, partly because I want to live more, feel more (even if it is peace of mind) and partly because noticing is the foundation to creating memories.
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Our memories are not static, and neither is the story we build around them. Maybe what makes this mechanism faulty is also what makes it so powerful: as we notice the patterns and tint memories with understanding, we may create, and access, a version of our past that lets us live our best present.
“am often struck by a kind of grief, the feeling that the present moment will be forever lost in my faulty synapses.” How beautifully expressed. I often feel this way too.