Made of This
This scant reliability of our memories will be satisfactorily explained only when we know in what language, in what alphabet they are written, on what surface, and with what pen …
—PRIMO LEVI, The Drowned and the Saved
“I LOST IT TODAY, BIG TIME,” said Elsa, a twenty-seven-year-old office worker, distraught over an incident on the bus on her way to my office. She witnessed a group of teenage girls ridiculing and taunting a very overweight man, giggling among themselves but speaking in voices loud enough to be easily overheard by the other passengers. “Something came over me,” Elsa related. “As I was getting off I heard myself screaming at them. ‘You girls are sick!’ I yelled. ‘You’re immature and mean and sick! You shouldn’t be allowed on this bus!’ Some other people got off at the same stop. When the bus left, I just stood there, still in a rage. They looked at me as if I was crazy—and I felt that I was crazy, too.”
David, a forty-year-old artisan, told a similar story. He was walking down his street when he saw two policemen handcuffing an elderly Italian woman who had, apparently, been yelling at the neighbors and threatening them over some incident. “They were so rough with her,” David said. “There was no gentleness, no understanding showing on their faces. She was just a problem to them. When they pushed her into the van, I wanted to scream at them to stop, but I felt paralyzed. My mouth was dry, and I couldn’t have said a thing. I felt ashamed later of being such a coward. I could have made a phone call at least when I got home to complain to somebody about it, but I was too upset even to do that.”
Both Elsa and David have attention deficit disorder, and the stories they told echo experiences and feelings I have heard from many others with ADD: a painful hyperconsciousness of injustice, accompanied by ineffective rage or by shamed silence. Time after time, adults with ADD relate how sickened they are at seeing someone weak hurt or humiliated—how sickened they are, and how helpless they feel at intervening. I use the word sickened literally: there is a churning, nauseating feeling in the pit of the stomach and the head spins.
In some of the popular literature on ADD and on some of the Internet websites, there is a celebration of attention deficit disorder as a condition that bestows a special kind of human empathy on individuals affected by it. “The world needs us people with ADD,” I heard a speaker declare at a major conference, to enthusiastic applause. There is some truth in that way of seeing attention deficit disorder, but not enough insight. The stories of Elsa and David speak of something more painful than empathy and something less effective, too: they speak of identification. When a person empathizes, he can understand another’s feelings and even share them, but he is conscious of himself as a separate individual, capable of taking independent and useful action. When he becomes identified, that boundary disappears. He reacts as if he was himself the victim. He feels the victim’s humiliation, his helpless rage, his shame. This is not a state of adult human fellow feeling from which he can act effectively: it is a state of memory. He is gripped by the past.
As the Harvard psychiatrist Judith Lewis Herman has pointed out, “To some degree everyone is a prisoner of the past.”1 Without knowing it, we often relive the past. What we take for present-day reality represents, in many situations, reactivated early memories stored in the implicit memory system, a vast and infallibly accurate record of past experiences. Implicit memory happens, according to the psychologist and memory researcher Daniel Schacter, “when people are influenced by a past experience without any awareness that they are remembering.”2 Unconscious emotions and conscious feelings, rapid shifts in mood and dramatic physiological changes in the body can occur under the impact of implicit memory.
It is now known that memory does not function like a video camera, storing all the information from an experience on a single, previously blank tape. Retrieving memories is not like searching a file to locate some desired item. Not only are there many components to the recording, storage and reactivation of each memory, but also scientists and psychologists who study the subject speak these days of more than one type of memory process. “The brain clearly has multiple memory systems, each devoted to different kinds of learning and memory functions,” writes the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux.3 The ability to bring consciously to mind specific events, feelings or ideas is only one form of memory, named explicit memory. Explicit memory is recall: facts, images and impressions of the past that we can “call back” more or less at will and describe verbally.
For short-term memories to fix in the brain for storage in long-term memory, they have to be encoded. There are many components to any experience, Daniel Schacter points out, physical and emotional: sights, sounds, words, actions, feelings. Each of these is analyzed by different sets of circuits in the brain. Encoding occurs as the connections between the various circuits involved in the experience are strengthened. (We can recall here the principle that “neurons that fire together, wire together.”) These circuits are located in many separate parts of the brain, which is why there is no single neurological filing cabinet for memory storage. Each new memory is a new pattern of strengthened connections between widely distributed brain circuits. A memory happens when the circuits that participated in the original encoding are simultaneously reactivated by some stimulus in the present. The connections between these circuits can be strengthened or weakened with time. They are very much subject to emotional influences that can either reinforce or sabotage them.
The implicit memory circuits carry the neurological traces of infancy and of childhood experiences. Encoded in them is the emotional content of those experiences, but not necessarily the details of the events themselves that gave rise to the emotions. There may be at least three reasons for this. First, as we saw in the chapters on brain development, the infant’s initial interactions with people are based more on feelings than on conscious awareness of the environment. Second, the brain structures that encode explicit memory, or recall, develop later than those involved in implicit memory. Third, emotions may have been disassociated or repressed even as the events that first caused them were unfolding. No conscious awareness is necessary for the encoding of implicit memory, or for its being triggered. A tone of voice or a look in another’s eyes can activate powerful implicit memories. The person experiencing this type of memory may believe that he is just reacting to something in the present, remaining completely in the dark about what the rush of feelings that flood his mind and body really represents. Implicit memory is responsible for much of human behavior, its workings all the more influential because unconscious. Whenever we experience ourselves caught up in feelings that seem to overwhelm us, we are likely in the realm of implicit memory—as we also are when we find ourselves quite cut off from feelings. “[The] implicit effects of past experiences shape our emotional reactions, preferences, and dispositions—key elements of what we call personality,” writes Daniel Schacter. “… While our sense of self and identity is highly dependent on explicit memory for past episodes and autobiographical facts, our personalities may be more closely tied to implicit memory processes.”4
The episodes involving Elsa and David are implicit memories. Their emotional and physical reactions to witnessing the humiliation and rough handling of another human being are the reactivation of sensations first encoded during a much earlier time of their lives when they themselves were helpless and felt shame and humiliation. David, I already knew, grew up in a home with an alcoholic father who had an unpredictable temper and a bent for violence. Being the youngest child, he was also the target of his older sister’s verbal and physical abuse. Elsa’s biography, though less overtly traumatic, was emotionally just as wrenching. She was the eldest of four children and always felt outside the family circle. Her mother was critical of her because she saw herself mirrored in the child’s sensitive and highly reactive nature. Elsa was hit sometimes, but mostly she suffered from her mother’s inability to connect with her emotionally, and from her cutting words. “I don’t understand how I could have ended up with a daughter like you,” her mother once told her. The emotions that arose in Elsa and David in response to the injustices they each witnessed recently were those of small children: impotent rage, helpless shame. Because in order to maintain their relationships with their parents they had to dissociate their emotional reactions from conscious awareness, these emotions did not come up as they recalled these facts of their childhood, only when some event in the present triggered them. The events stayed in explicit memory, the emotions survived as implicit memories. In other cases, only the implicit memory may endure, the physical events themselves completely lost to recall.
Of course, not in every case of attention deficit disorder is there parental dysfunction to the degree that Elsa and David had to live with. There does not have to be severe trauma for neurological circuits to be encoded with emotions of exclusion, injustice and humiliation. It can happen in loving families, if a sensitive child has unconscious or even preverbal experiences of feeling alone and cut off, misunderstood and shamed. From that arises a close identification with the powerless, with the underdog—the people Dostoevsky called “the insulted and the injured.” The goal for the ADD adult is to move from the helplessness of identification to the empowered state of empathy.
Other well-known features of attention deficit disorder can be understood when interpreted in the light of implicit memory, notably the trouble with authority figures reported by most ADD adults. This trouble can present itself in three ways: fear, rebelliousness or a combination of both. There is always at least an inner rejection of authority, a perhaps unspoken sense that people with power are unseeing, unknowing and unfair. This is simply the implicit memory of the adult who, as a sensitive child, saw through the pretensions and weaknesses of the adult world. Around authority figures such as employers, doctors, teachers and policemen, the ADD adult will experience a nervousness and lack of confidence that cannot be explained by the actual power relationship that exists in the present. As influential as any of the above personages can be, under normal circumstances none of them have the power to evoke nearly so much fear. In the interaction with authority, the implicit memory system becomes activated. One is again a child, facing powerful adults. “Like a child” is precisely how many ADD adults describe their sense of themselves in relationship to authority.
ADD reactions to authority are not always due to implicit memory. Sometimes they come from counterwill, which, as we have seen, is a sign of an underdeveloped sense of self. “I was always rebellious,” said Mary-Lynn, a thirty-six-year-old mother of two. “Any sign of authority, and I just want to stick it in their face.” Such automatic resistance to rules, regulations and authority simply means that the adult is not yet an adult. It does not smooth one’s way in the world. I have always felt, in almost any situation, a compulsive urge to expose the feet of clay, the chink in the armor, the flaws of those in charge. It is only too true that often authority does totter along on feet of clay. But one always has much to gain from an open mind, much to learn if one parks automatic oppositionality at the door.
Counterwill coupled with implicit memory can deeply affect someone’s relationship to society and politics. As a student radical during the Vietnam era in the late 1960s, I used to be infuriated at psychologists and psychiatrists who explained away the antiwar activism and political rebelliousness of the young generation as a displaced, wet-behind-the-ears, unconscious adolescent rebellion against parents. Now when I look back, I can see what truth there was in that view—and what obtuse blindness as well. The style and tone of the student opposition certainly owed much to adolescent acting out and to unresolved and inchoate anger that did not originate with the war. The critics were right: the sometimes reflexive and unthinking lashing-out at authority carried the hallmarks of unconscious, implicit memory and immature rebelliousness. To the degree this was so, it was also less effective than it might have been, more likely to alienate others. Where the learned doctors and mind experts were wrong, however, was in their disregard for the reality of the issues raised by the antiwar opposition. They identified, correctly enough, the psychological flaw. Their mistake was to believe that thereby they had discredited the clear-sightedness that outrage had granted to antiwar youth. It is the same with attention deficit disorder. Sharing the perspective of the downtrodden may originate in implicit memory, but to say so is not to invalidate the truth thereby seen. In this sense, the conference speaker was right: humanity does need people capable of seeing past the official line, unwilling or unable to obliterate their conscious awareness of what is wrong in the world.
Implicit memory tends to be much less forgetful than explicit memory, especially of emotional conditioning. “Conditioned fear learning is particularly resilient,” Joseph LeDoux suggests, “and in fact may represent an indelible form of learning.”5 The implicit memory of early fear conditioning probably contributes to the specific neurophysiological impairments of ADD. An example would be the loss of mental clarity, to the point of mental paralysis, experienced during situations of emotional stress. It would account for the well-known “examination amnesia” of many students with attention deficit disorder.
While explicit memories are being retrieved—when we recall something—there appears to be increased blood flow to the frontal lobe of the brain. Radioactive brain scans, by contrast, have shown in some ADD brains slowed frontal lobe activity and diminished blood flow to this part of the cortex during stressful mental effort. What we may be seeing here are implicit memory circuits imprinted with fear overwhelming explicit memory.* The student enters the examination room having studied and knowing his subject full well, only to find himself completely unable to answer the questions put in front of him. I believe what happens is that the experience of having to prove one’s worthiness and the fear of failure give a strong emotional shock to the ADD mind’s ability to activate recall memory. The circuits are sabotaged by the neurophysiological and neurochemical effects of anxiety. A massive shutdown occurs. Having to prove herself in the examination setting, within a restricted time, would trigger in the mind of the sensitive student—adult or child—deep fears of rejection buried in the unconscious. Since what is being tested here is not just knowledge but also the ability to activate memory in the face of rejection anxiety, the ADD student is at a great disadvantage. Implicit fear memory, acquired much earlier than intellectual memory, dominates.
Others with ADD may have the intellectual confidence to do well during examinations. Nevertheless, they can be reduced to the helpless inarticulateness of a semiverbal toddler in other situations, superficially trivial, if anxieties imprinted in their implicit memory system long ago are triggered. To give a personal example, my voice quickly falters when someone as much as averts his eyes from me while I am speaking with him. My words lose connection and dry up, like water trickling into sand. “For the rest of our lives,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “the seemingly trivial gestures first understood in late infancy serve to anchor both our human relationships and our thought processes … Should someone stare at us blankly, gaze off into space, or remain mute, we begin to feel confused, rejected, perhaps even unloved. Very sensitive individuals may even find their thinking becoming disorganized, their sense of purpose gradually dissolving.”6 My experience, precisely.
*These research findings were discussed in chapter 5.