Memory Times Three

I have another site about words The word "memory" is all over our language, especially in idioms. Clear it, jog it, have it etched in your mind, stroll down memory lane, lose your train of thought, have a mental picture, or have something slip your mind. Maybe your memory is like a sieve, or you can remember like an elephant, perhaps even have a mind like a steel trap.

There are so many ways to describe memory. A neurobiologist, such as Flavio Donato, University of Basel, will do it differently than the rest of us. His studies suggest that memories are left in multiple traces—or patterns of neuronal activity—each on a different population of neurons.

These groups of neurons form at different stages of the brain’s development and are found in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is a small, seahorse-shaped brain structure located in the medial temporal lobe, crucial for forming new memories, learning, and spatial navigation, and is part of the limbic system. 

1. Neurons emerge in embryonic development; they create stability for long-term memories.
2. Following these “early-born” neurons are “late-born” neurons, primarily used to retrieve short-term memories
3. During an intermediate stage of embryonic development, neurons form that are used for the recollection of a memory at both recent and remote time points.

So, a single memory of yours is left in multiple traces.

The 3 Stages of Memory

Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

Our current theory on memory is that though we have one memory system, it has three separate stages — sensory, short-term, and long-term.

Sensory memory is very short-term. This memory lasts less than half a second. That seems almost useless, but it allows you to capture an image, sound, or other sensation. These very brief not-even-moments then move immediately into short-term memory.

Short-term memory (which some theorists prefer to call "working memory") is both a filter and temporary storage. In this stage, we will either push out the memory or put it into long-term memory storage.

When a login code is sent to my phone that temporary popup is in my short-term memory, used, and then filtered out as non-essential. I certainly can't recall it a minute later. So, the filtering of these memories and discarding is a good thing. I don't want to remember everything I experience, see or hear forever.

Long-term memory holds valuable memories, although how that value is determined is not really understood. These memories are about as permanent as our memory gets and theoretically long-term memory can store unlimited amounts of information indefinitely.

These memories are stronger. It is why you can recall something from your childhood that happened 40 years ago. There are several reasons why these memories are retained. For example, recalling an event multiple times does put it more securely into long-term storage. Retelling that funny story from your vacation to multiple people over the course of months and years not only helps retain it but actually alters the memory.

The part that interests me more and more and I and my friends and family age is short-term memory since that is the part we lose as we get older.

Short-term memory seems to be temporarily stored for only 15-30 seconds. Brain studies have shown that the consolidation of short-term memories into long-term memories largely takes place in the hippocampus. But we don't have a "place" in the brain for short-term memory.

I take a deeper dive into short-term memory and some ways you might be able to improve it in an article I wrote at Weekends in Paradelle.

Memory: Done and Gone

I read an article by Lewis Hyde excerpted from his book A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past. In the excerpt, he describes a phenomenon that I don't think I had ever observed in myself concerning memory.

He describes a time in the 1920s when Dr. Kurt Lewin noticed that waiters were very good at remembering the particulars of a restaurant bill, but once the bill was paid they forgot the orders. He wondered if we forget a finished task more easily than an unfinished one.
His colleague, Bluma Zeigarnik, studied the premise and found that it was true. Now called the Zeigarnik effect, she concluded that “Unfinished tasks are remembered approximately twice as well as completed ones.”

Why does this happen? Zeigarnik believed that we have a need for completion, a desire for resolution, and so the memory endures. Once completed, it is more easily forgotten.

Dickens' Dream by Robert William Buss, 1875 (Public Domain via Wikemedia)

I thought about this immediately in connection with my writing - particularly my poetry. Do I forget my poems when they are finished but remember my unfinished ones?

Hyde uses a literary example with a story that I have read before about a time when Ernest Hemingway’s wife lost a suitcase containing the only copies of many of his stories. He was unable to re-create them. He commented on this in a later story, “The Strange Country.”

"Some of the stories had been about boxing, and some about baseball and others about horse racing. They were the things I had known best and had been closest to and several were about the first war. Writing them I had felt all the emotion I had to feel about those things and I had put it all in and all the knowledge of them that I could express and I had rewritten and rewritten until it was all in them and all gone out of me. Because I had worked on newspapers since I was very young I could never remember anything once I had written it down; as each day you wiped your memory clear with writing as you might wipe a blackboard clear with a sponge or a wet rag."

Hyde also says that more modern studies of the Zeigarnik effect have not shown the effect to be conclusively true. Hyde feels the studies have been "poorly designed" and so the results have been mixed. He would like to see studies based on "memories of emotional states."

He believes that desire seeks completion. Unrequited desire is hard to forget.

My poetry, though often connected to emotions, does not seem to be the best example. I remember my finished poems much better than the unfinished ones (and there are many unfinished ones). I don't have a strong need to finish most of them. I abandon many.

I was involved in a poetry experiment in a workshop that dealt with this theory of memory. The poet leader had asked us to write a first draft on a prompt for homework. He wanted one attempt, on paper (not computer) and then stop and bring it to class the next day.

In class, he collected them immediately - and then dropped them into a garbage can. The class was shocked. He said " Now, write that poem again. Whatever you recall matters. the rest will fall away."  Some of us remembered much of the draft; some remembered almost nothing. I recalled the opening and a few phrases and the general idea I wanted to convey. I think I did remember the best of the poem. At the end of the workshop, you could take your draft from the trash. It was interesting to see what had fallen away.

I first read Lewis Hyde with his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property  which a friend recommended as a good book about creativity. One premise of Hyde's is that the marketplace is a terrible way to determine the worth of artists’ work. He calls the alternative economy "the gift" which allows creations and ideas to circulate freely, an idea which may make sense to you if you have ever given or received a work of art.

A Primer for Forgetting describes a version of forgetfulness through art and writing that offers forgetfulness as something that might offer a creative force.

In another book, Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde looks at human imagination as it is portrayed in trickster mythology which goes back to Hermes in Greece, Krishna in India, and Coyote in North America, and then comes into the modern works of Picasso, Duchamp, Allen Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass.

       

Does the Web Mean the End of Forgetting? And Is That Good or Bad?

I wrote a post once about the virtual life that is likely to follow you after your death.  I joke to friends that because of my queue of posts to various sites that I have, I will probably be posting new things for awhile after I pass from this world.

And I know I have forgotten more than I remember.   Can the Web help me with that?

This 2010 article from The New York Times suggested that "The Web Means the End of Forgetting."

Is that a good thing?  Could this also create an existential crisis? Does what the Internet offers make it impossible to erase your posted past and move on?

...a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever...

Our character, ultimately, can’t be judged by strangers on the basis of our Facebook or Google profiles; it can be judged by only those who know us and have time to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses, face to face and in context, with insight and understanding. In the meantime, as all of us stumble over the challenges of living in a world without forgetting, we need to learn new forms of empathy, new ways of defining ourselves without reference to what others say about us and new ways of forgiving one another for the digital trails that will follow us forever.