Memory

Elizabeth Loftus

Memory is imperfect. This is because we often do not see things accurately in the first place. But even if we take in a reasonably accurate picture of some experience, it does not necessarily stay perfectly intact in memory. Another force is at work. The memory traces can actually undergo distortion. With the passage of time, with proper motivation, with the introduction of special kinds of interfering facts, the memory traces seem sometimes to change or become transformed. These distortions can be quite frightening, for they can cause us to have memories of things that never happened. Even in the most intelligent among us is memory thus malleable. 

A healthy distrust of one's memory, and of memory in general, is not a bad idea. When all is said an done, memory is selective; the memory machine is selective about what gets in and selective about how it changes over time. This may be adaptive in many ways. Why should we cling tightly to those memories that disturb us and spoil our lives?? Life might become so much more pleasant if it is not marred by our memory of past ills, sufferings, and grievances. What good does it do for my friend Diana to remember clearly all the ways an old beau has mistreated her? We seem to have been purposely constructed with a mechanism for erasing the tape of our memory, or at least bending the memory tape, so that we can live and function without being haunted by the past. Accurate memory, in some instances, would simply get in the way. Now, knowing this, others can--if they so wish--take advantage of us. Advertisers and politicians, for example, can bend memory to their advantage. In doing so, they are simply tampering with a system that serves us well in some ways but occasionally does us in.

According to the cliche, memory fades. In fact, however, it grows. What may fade is the initial perception, the actual experience of the events. But every time we recall an event we must reconstruct the memory, and so each time it is changed--colored by succeeding events, increased understanding, a new context, suggestions by others, other people's recollections.

The Strange Tale of Mr. M and the Nature of Memory

Philip Hilts

In reflection upon these things, after a time, I began to feel that the heart of memory's mystery is not actually the memory. It is the act of experience itself that is most mysterious.
We do not actually see the color of objects; we merely pick up with limited antennae--the rods and cones--a few of the different wave forms, in a narrow range of vibration, among the many deflected-off objects. Because we sense them as different, we have named them 'colors.' But the colors are not properties of objects; they occur between the object and the eye. We do not hear the sounds of the world either; we merely pick up a few of the scattering waves of pressure in the air, in a narrow range of frequency, as they tap against the stretched skin drums within our ears, and we have named them sounds. We do not smell the fragrances of the world but merely pick up a few of the escaping chemicals from the surface of nearby objects, in a narrow range of shapes that well fit the detectors within our noses, and we have called them smells.

And so it is, after some years of exploration and thought, that we must conclude that the central feature of memory is its malleability. It is changeable upon the instant. New information adds to, overlays, or confuses old feelings, thoughts, and knowledge. Memory is, at the end, a site of endless construction where facades come down, beams are shifted, walls are sucked together or blown apart, all in response to the current, most urgent needs.

Mental life may be imagined as a continuous storytelling--taking bits and fitting them into a running narrative that makes sense of where we have been, what's going on now, and what to do next. It is stories that make some kind of sense of the welter of data from outside, where there is no sense. It is we who must make sense of things. 'Stories' are merely the structure we make with selected bits of input. We meet two Italians and so, on meeting the third, expect something and are pleased to find it. Now we have some kind of internal rule about Italians. True, it could be overturned on further experience, but we use our expectations like pitons to scale the side of life.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

David Foster Wallace

The depressed person was in terrible and unceasing emotional pain, and the impossibility of sharing or articulating this pain was itself a component of the pain and a contributing factor in its essential horror.
Despairing, then, of describing the emotional pain or expressing its utterness to those around her, the depressed person instead described circumstances, both past and ongoing, which were somehow related to the pain, to its etiology and cause, hoping at least to be able to express to others something of the pain's context, its--as it were--shape and texture. The depressed person's parents, for example, who had divorced when she was a child, had used her as a pawn in the sick games they played. The depressed person had, as a child, required orthodonture, and each parent had claimed -- not without some cause, given the Medicean legal ambiguities of the divorce settlement, the depressed person always inserted when she described the painful struggle between her parents over the expense of her orthodonture -- that the other should be required to pay for it. And the venomous rage of each parent over the other's petty, selfish refusal to pay was vented on their daughter, who had to hear over and over gain from each parent how the other was unloving and selfish. both parents were well off, and each had privately expressed to the depressed person that s/he was, of course, if push came to shove, willing to pay for all the orthodonture the depressed person needed and then some, that it was, at its heart, a matter not of money or dentition but of 'principle'. And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a trusted friend the circumstances of the struggle over the cost of her, to concede that it may very well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, just that (i.e., a matter of 'principle'), though unfortunately not a 'principle' that took into account their daughter's needs or her feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of parental neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected -- here the depressed person nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment -- to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in. This was just one example. The depressed person averaged four interpolated apologies each time she recounted for supportive friends this type of painful and damaging past circumstance on the telephone, as well as a sort of preamble in which she attempted to describe how painful and frightening it was not to feel able to articulate the chronic depression's excruciating pain itself but to have to resort to recounting examples that probably sounded, she always took care to acknowledge, dreary or self-pitying or like one of those people who are narcissistically obsessed with their 'painful childhoods' and 'painful lives' and wallow in their burdens and insist on recounting them at tiresome length to friends who are trying to be supportive and nurturing, and bore them and repel them.

Vineland

Thomas Pynchon

What it was, 's your mother lost her respect for me. She'd be too honorable to say it, but that was it. She'd think these things all the way through, politically, but I'd only be trying to get out of the day in one piece. I was never the brave Wobbly her father was. Jess stood up, and he was struck down for it, and there was all of American History 101 for her, right there. How the hell was I gonna measure up? I thought I was doing what was necessary for my wife and my baby, freedom didn't come into it the way it did for Sasha, your grandpa, understood that taking 'free' as far as you can usually leads to 'dead,' but he was never afraid of that, and I was, 'cause they can drop a Brute 450 on you just as easy as a tree...

If her luck held, she'd never have to know. The baby was perfect cover, it made her something else, a mom, that was all, just another mom in the nation of moms, and all she'd ever have to do to be safe was stay inside that particular fate, bring up the kid, grow into some version of Sasha, deal with Zoyd and his footloose band and all the drawbacks there, forget Brock, the siege, Weed Atman's blood, 24fps and the old sweet community, forget whoever she'd been, shoot inoffensive little home movies now and then, speak the right lines, stay within budget, wrap each day, one by one, before she lost the light. Prairie could be her guaranteed salvation, pretending to be Prairie's mom the worst lie, the basest betrayal.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Mark Haddon

It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears's house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog. The points of the fork must have gone all the way through the dog into the ground because the fork had not fallen over. I decided that the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.