PRELUDE:
I recently watched the mini-series called “In the Brain” (by Vox Productions) on Netflix, took notes on large parts of its content and have written little re-formulated narratives based on this.
!! I know from my own studies there to be much much more to the areas I touch upon in these story-like recollections, so I keep in mind while reading these that they are by no means meant to be comprehensive accounts of mental processes/phenomenon but sorts of introductory mind teaser !!
So now for the good stuff:
It probably makes sense that our questions surrounding the nature of memory first came about by observing those who have issues with recollecting the past.
There are countless examples of course, but Henry Molaison (H.M.) was one of the first.
So what happened to him?
Well he happened to have his hippocampus removed in an effort to treat his epilepsy.
It all happened quite some time ago in 1953.
Can one not help but to imagine themselves to be poor Henry, waking up to the needlings and white-coatedness of the scientists surrounding his aura.
Mustn’t have been fun.
Would’ve been even worse to have been asked questions after all that, but that is exactly what he was asked to do.
One of the first questions was on the events of yesterday.
Yesterday?
Yesterday could’ve seemed to Henry quite a stupid question at the time. I imagine he would have been as floored as anyone else in his inability to formulate a coherent reply.
It was indeed the case that during the time following his procedure, his mind – at this point not composed of the cerebral material that had been there before – felt sticky, as if someone had just hosted a party in during which an entire carton of sickly mixer had been spilt and left overnight to fester uncomfortably.
The researchers found during their questioning that although Henry knew the name of the current President was most definitely Dwight Eisenhower, he could not tell you minute and simple things about himself or of his experiences.
This was strange.
What was even stranger was that knowledge surrounding the nature future was equally as hazy and in some ways even more eerily formless than his understanding of his own past.
(Note here that the creators of this documentary didn’t bother to focus on whether the underlying issue – Henry’s epilepsy – was cured. I suspect it was but I remain curious to know for sure and may at some point in the future end up reading the original paper to find out if this is true.)
Now, lets turn our attentions away from this extenuating individual to the grander scheme of things.
Today, we have come a loong way from being reliant on patient studies as a form of experimental evidence, but we are admittedly still quite baffled by the biological nature of memories (how are these stored?). In this documentary, this uncertainly was overcome by tackling a few broadranging questions that can be approached through increasingly theoretical avenues of inquiry.
The first question that was asked is as follows:
What makes something memorable?
1.Emotional Affiliation
It is argued here, as well as I suspect in many other fields that one of the most poignant factors influencing memory formation is one’s emotional experience: strong feelings pave soil-free incisions along the pathways upon the cognitive map onto which the unsteady railroad tracks of memory are lain.
Real world evidence of this stems from the fact that people tend to remember many events that occurred in the era of a wealth of personally significant occasions (their teens and 20s) better compared to those at older ages, when it could be said that life is more of a liner trajectory with less changing components.
(This may be the case on a general sort of scale, but it would also make sense for certain emotions to have an increasingly profound impact in conferring memory retention…This is probably worth looking into….)
Anyways, I am getting incredibly side tracked by my own ideas. So now, let us bring our attention back to the commentary of this documentary.
As mentioned previously, emotions are a grand portion of the equation, but there are of course others…
2.The Ability to Place the Memory Within a Spatio-Temporal Context
It is in this section that the idea of the ‘mind palace’ that is so often credited to the success of expert memorisers becomes relevant.
And here they mention hippocampal place cells!1!!
(As a side note this part got me #lit because I believe this story-like approach to be effective due to parable – story telling – being the most significant underlying mechanism that makes us human, but I will get into that in another story…)
In terms of story telling an memory it is not all alike. By inserting bits and pieces to be memorised into a kooky sort of story context creates connections between these ideas that can later be thought back on in a way that makes sense.
And what’s been discovered so far is that the more outrageous these affliations, the easier they are to keep in mind.
Think for example of a anthropomorphising the hormones of the menstrual cycle in order to remember how the rising levels of each relate to each other (lol).
The documentary doesn’t mention this but I believe that this may in part be due to the fact that it almost makes it fun to try to remember something that you so desperately tried to keep in memory just moments before this mental shift into story-dom.
At this point we have looked at some factors that probably influence the creation of a lasting memory.
It is natural then, to start to consider the opposing processes: are there specific attributes that may be accredited to drawing a blank?
In slightly more scientific terms we may ask:
What are the factors influencing failures of memory retrieval?
For the sake of consistency the creators of this documentary examined this through the lens of the same two factors that were investigated to be helpful for remembering:
1.Forgetting Emotion-Linked Experiences
Contrary to what I would’ve expected, it appears that, emotion-linked memories are just as effortless to forget as those not linked to emotional experiences.
Wow, was not looking for more threads of research during my Netflix session but I do believe this must have been investigated on as part of some study at some point? Honestly there’s no way there wouldn’t be, this idea is way too juicy for scientists to pass up.
2.Forgetting of Spatio-Temporal Stories
Forgetting of stories is evidently more difficult than the forgetting of other types of facts and figures, but this is where things really start to get really interesting.
We retreat back to the start to bring it our minds eye Henry, the dude who in his loss of the past also seemed to slacken his grip of the times that lay ahead.
This is where I believe the creators of this series to make their best point so far:
Our mind is a time-machine, weaving together the past and the future into an inexorable network of understanding.
This notion has in fact been confirmed by more recent experimentation as well, that has demonstrated the same pathways to light up both when people were asked to imagine the past and the future.
So memory may not be all about the past after-all.
Why might this be?
Could it be that one of the functions of this system is stimulating possible features?
😲
Could this be the key to our success as a species?
Could it be that the way in which we string together a balanced representation of the past, present and future asserts the boundaries that create our sense of self?
😲 x 2
So having read my take on memory, I will leave you with this:
Is Henry Molaison still Henry Molaison when he no longer possesses a record of his experiences?
WAST WRTNG 