Time and memory
What is your earliest memory? Some people can remember looking up out of their cot. For others, there are incidents from when they were toddlers. For others, it’s an episode from a holiday or when they were at school.
Whatever your earliest memory is, it is a moment, one among many. But for some reason these ones are retrievable and many, many other similar incidents are lost to our recall. This raises several questions. One is, why are some experiences laid down and stored in memory and not others? We’ll get on to that one later. But first, how do we retrieve the stored memories?
Sometimes memories are triggered by external stimuli. And that gives a clue. Because it is a similar incident that causes us to re-live an episode that would otherwise stay buried. Could it be that memories are imprints, encapsulated somehow in our bodies (mainly the brain) and that they are linked up to events with a similar frequency? As if they were colour-coded? A pinkish-purple event brings to mind all the stored pinkish-purple episodes. A pathway is highlighted. A brownish-green event connects to the stored brownish-green memories. The pathway can be seemingly insignificant. A recollection of sitting down and drinking a glass of beer with a friend brings up similar memories of drinking a glass of beer. The memories have been linked together.
What does this say?
For a start, our sense of time is very unreliable when it comes to retrieving memories. When the memories are reactivated, they come alive again, as if they are happening now, all over again. Our brain is not a tape recorder or cd player, to be accessed when we hit the ‘replay’ button. We can’t do an action replay, like in a broadcast of a sporting event. Our memories are a series of nodes and threads, held experiences that carry something still to be processed. As such, they are personal to each of us: your experience, your story, and are not impartial like a mechanical recording. A memory is the residue. It is what stays with you from a specific experience.
In fact, we also might embellish the memories, adding extra bits that weren’t part of the original story. One person I knew turned this into an art form: with each retelling their stories grew in magnificence. Or you may combine similar incidents together into one single storyline. This isn’t lying or confabulation or poor memory. To me, it’s what the system does as it tries to process an experience that has not yet been fully integrated.
Why do we remember those particular moments among so many that we live through, every day? Breakfast, or a conversation or a flower, among so many breakfasts and conversations and flowers? What makes them memorable? For some reason these ones stay, some of them through the whole of our lives.
The ones that stay are the ones that made an impression, literally. And that can be good or bad: difficult/painful or wonderful/ awe-inspiring. Either way, there is still something in there for us to work through. In the case of the difficult ones, such as childhood unhappiness, maybe the system knows that we need to wait until the circumstances are right for us to be able to take a look at the difficulty. There is something to be learned in there, and the system holds it in storage until we are strong enough to deal with it. In the case of the inspiring ones, maybe they still carry nourishment for us. Those memories take us through the tough times. They tell us that we live in a world where wonderful things can happen, even if not many are happening right now.
Clearly, then, memories are strongly connected with emotions. The intensity of feeling associated with an experience makes it more likely that it will be stored as a memory. Excitement, anticipation, regret, contradiction, panic, dread, feeling valued … maybe each colour coded strand is associated with one of these or any other of the vast palette of emotions that we process.
So now, when someone asks me about something that happened and I have no recollection of it, it means that either I have dealt with it and relegated it — or I wasn’t paying attention at the time and missed an opportunity.
Some of our childhood and early adulthood memories are our record of the significant moments as we put together the story of who we are. They are the incidents when we took a stand, or something impressed itself on us. They are the pitons we put into the rockface as part of our climb into the creation of the person we are now. Those memories are the reference points in that process, and are there to be turned to for self-confirmation: this is the person I have decided to be!
And what about time? Time happens to our bodies and our world. Something you said yesterday or five minutes ago, a sunrise; those moments happen only once and then pass. Episodes that haunt us and replay over and over again in our heads, moments we are proud of; all of them are unchangeable, etched in history. They are there in the historical record, just as rock strata tell the story of the past of our planet. What has been done can never be undone. The strength of a memory that lives on in us is not to do with when it happened — recently or long ago — but with the intensity of emotion still associated with the experience.
When a memory keeps coming to the surface, maybe my system is trying to let me know that there is still something unresolved in there. It is up to me then whether or not I take the hint and revisit the episode. Maybe other departments tell me that the time isn’t right yet, in which case I’ll let it sit there. Or I may decide that with the assistance of the perspective and experience that have since accrued, I can try to see it again, from the point of view of now.
Then comes a difficult part. When a memory is re-evoked, it brings up the same feelings that were experienced when it was laid down in the first place. When a memory comes up strongly in that way, I have learned to ask myself, is this one on its way in or its way out? Because it has to be one or the other, and it is easy to misinterpret. Do I suddenly feel a desire to revisit a place I spent a lot of time at? Maybe that episode is being consigned to the past, and so for a while my system is flooded with the sense of what it was like to be there: the smells, the colours, the people. On the other hand, maybe there is still something about that place that I need to be with. Either way, it’s important to try to make sense of what is going on, because sometimes it is a painful episode that comes back to the surface, and the pain is re-experienced.
If I suspect a memory is on its way out, I try not to get involved with it as I re-live whatever happened. I just let it play out as best I can, and remind myself that now I am older, in a different situation, with more to bring to bear. When I take the time to do that and see the story through, fully, then afterwards the memories are still there, but without so much emotional attachment. And you never know — I might be a little wiser having gone through the process.
What happens to each of us as we go through our lives is not always within our control. How we think about what has happened to us, the positions and decisions we take after reviewing the memories — that’s the part we have control over.
May your life be full of rich, meaningful and treasured memories.
