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.