How wonderful, how very wonderful are the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind! … If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient – at others, so bewildered and so weak – and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! – We are to be sure a miracle every way – but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park1
But when nothing subsists of an old past, after the death of people, after the destruction of things, alone frailer but more enduring, more immaterial, more persistent, more faithful, smell and taste still remain for a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, on the ruin of all the rest, bearing without giving way, on their almost impalpable droplet the immense edifice of memory.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
1 | Memory only exists in organisms that are able to propel themselves using muscles. The sea squirt uses muscles to move itself about the ocean. At some point in its life it finds a rock on which to plant itself, and there it will remain for the rest of its days. As soon as it is situated it consumes – since they are no longer of any use – its own brain and nervous system.
2 | Memories are not hallucinations. Hallucinations feel real. We confuse the hallucination with normal perception, but we never confuse memories and everyday experience. For sufferers of posttraumatic stress syndrome, however, ‘memories’ of trauma are typically not only misremembered but re-experienced as a hallucination. The syndrome is devastating because the ‘memory’ feels more real than the original experience.
Habit weakens all things; but the things which are best at reminding us of a person are those which, because they were insignificant, we have forgotten and which have therefore lost none of their power. Which is why the greater part of our memory exists outside us, in a dampish breeze, in the musty air of a bedroom or the smell of autumn’s first fires, things through which we can retrieve any part of us that the reasoning mind, having no use for it, disdained, the last vestige of the past, the best of it, the part which, after all our tears seem to have dried, can make us weep again. Outside us? Inside us, more like, but stored away from our mind’s eye, in that abeyance of memory which may last for ever.
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past
3 | Where do memories live? What space do they inhabit? Are they some kind of skein of knitted neural pathways? Are they stored in the external world like addresses in the iCloud? In bodies and brains, in history, in culture? What do we become if we lose all our memories? Are we no more than an archive of our memories?
4 | When Jean Cocteau revisited his childhood home, no memories stirred until he crouched low and dragged a stick along the wooden fence. And then the memories came flooding back.
5 | Memories can be retrieved from the brain artificially by stimulating it with electricity. Researchers have discovered that smells help call forth emotional memories, but they do not make the memories any more detailed.
6 | The Roman philosopher Cicero (106–43 BC) credited the Greek poet Simonides (c.556–468 BC) with creating the art of memory. Simonides discovered that visual memory works best. The Greek statesman and general Themistocles (c.524–459 BC) memorised the names of 20,000 fellow Athenians. Medieval scholars memorised whole books. Talmudic scholars from Poland even today use visual techniques to memorise thousands of pages of the Babylonian Talmud.
7 | A reductive evolutionary explanation tells us that a good visual memory helps us remember where we put important things.
8 | An experiment by Anthony De Casper and Melanie Spence, psychologists at the University of North Carolina, suggests that babies have memories from birth. A group of pregnant women read The Cat in the Hat by Dr Seuss aloud twice a day for the last six weeks of pregnancy. While their newborns were being breastfed, a story was played to them through an earphone, either The Cat in the Hat or some other story they had not heard before. Ten out of twelve babies altered their speed of feeding when the familiar story began. The speed of feeding did not alter when the unfamiliar story was played. More widely, it is supposed that infants do not remember, because the hippocampus, that part of the brain that controls memory, develops after birth.2 London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than other people of the same age. Birds that have more powerful spatial memories than other birds – for example those that store food, like nuthatches and jays – have a larger hippocampus.
9 | When the gears slip and I coast in neutral, paying no attention to the world, to where I am, who am I? My memory brings the world back to me. The world back, and back to me: two miracles. Sometimes when my mind stays blank too long, when for too long a moment I cannot remember the name of my best friend, then I glimpse the fumbling icy maw of the black blank world. When I am engrossed in memories, again the world disappears: no cup, no table, no room, not anything – not even a self, perhaps. Yet here they all are again, returned with a snap of attention, so not lost at all; the living world hiding, ready to jump back into consciousness with a start, consistent with the world as we remembered it when we last checked.
The playwright Samuel Beckett said that memory presents the world in monochrome. My memory hardly presents the world at all. When I think of the past in a generalised way, there’s nothing there. I run down empty corridors with a guttering candle looking in at empty rooms. Occasionally here and there I find a broken chair, some ragged curtains flapping at windows that frame what looks like black night, no stars, only the oppressing weight of the annihilating, infinite emptiness of outside.
10 | Memory is feeble if it is to be judged by its ability to reconstitute the past. We live perpetually startled at the disjunction between what is and what has been. Memories make connections not so much across time as outside time. The connections are made not chronologically but out of puns, surreal juxtapositions, random associations, in the way dreams are. Memory seems to work best when we make some synthetic connection between things. Synaesthesia does this naturally. Nothing in the brain is purely auditory, or purely visual, or purely anything. The brain is highly connected. There is interconnection between different types of sensory input. Synaesthesia is more common than was once thought, and to some degree we are all synaesthetes. Language suggests it: the loud shirt, the sharp cheese. Synaesthesia seems to be common among the creative. Kandinsky, Pollock, Nabokov and Rimbaud were synaesthetes. Richard Feynman saw letters in colours. Scriabin argued with composer friends about what colours the keys were. He said gold/brown for D major, and red/purple for E flat major. V.S. Ramachandran writes of Francesca, for whom touching denim causes feelings of sadness, wax of embarrassment, silk calm, orange-peel shock, sandpaper guilt. There seems to be no common lexicon between synaesthetes; each lexicon is private.
11 | I come across the words ‘pencil case’, and memories of the pencil cases of childhood come to mind: precise and imprecise. As I close in on them I find that these memories are clustered about by other memories: of the wooden ruler that for some reason has the same smell as the gas that put me under in the dentist’s chair. I remember the taste of the blood that leaked from the crater where the abscessed tooth had been; and now the taste of the cloves that did not take away the pain. I remember the feel of cotton wool pressed on my gums. I see the small bottle of BP olive oil in the medicine cupboard, the little pot of thick yellow paste that was meant to salve chilblains, the frost on the windows as I lie in bed ready to jump out into the cold day as if preparing to dive into freezing water, the rush to pile on as many clothes as quickly as possible to stop the shivering from the cold, the struck match to the gas fire, the bar on the electric fire and the smell of burning dust … The dentist with his red hair, bad breath and false smile, my terror, a collective of sadistic teachers, and the generalised feeling of other childhood terrors pressing in, waiting, ghostly; I could sweep down and attend to them if I chose to, but I choose not to and think of something else.
12 | We collectivise our past in memories. Recent research tells us that what we remember from our early childhood is mostly memories of stories told to us by other members of our family. And apparently even those memories are so lightly held that we can be persuaded to change the details. Families who get together to discuss the details of some past event, variously remembered by the different members, will probably come to some collective agreement: that, say, the dress was red, not yellow; that the month was June, not April, and so on.
Ah, yes, I remember it well.
Memories can be fed. If an accident victim is asked: ‘Did the collision occur before or after the zebra crossing?’ she will remember the zebra crossing and construct a story even though there was no zebra crossing.
13 | When I was a child, I do not remember how old, I made a determined effort to manufacture a memory that I might hold onto and revisit from my future self. As a child I was hardly aware of having a past, but I could see that there was likely to be a future, and where there was a future there would trail a past leading back to me as I was at that moment. I knew that I must get older, but I did not know how. I thought means were required, as if I might fail to age for lack of the necessary skills. How in just a year could I become as changed as the children in the class above? To be four years older seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle. To be an adult was to be laughably and entirely other. I would have to leave myself behind, continually leave selves behind. I wondered if a memory might serve as a rope to throw out to my older self, a rope that I could twitch from time to time from the future and remember my younger self. Myself at both ends: forever the child of that moment at one end, and always changing – for as long as there was rope to unravel – at the other. What memory could hold the weight of me let down into time? I wondered if I should make myself cry, or create some other dramatic gesture, but somehow I knew the memory had to be absolutely true, not falsely dramatic. The memory need be nothing more than the moment exactly as it was: just me sitting on my single bed. I see the bedspread. I remember the feel of it still, the vividness of the orange material, the ridges of the piping, I remember that it was called a candlewick bedspread – actually for years I thought it was called a camberwell bedspread, until I was corrected recently by a friend, my mistake encouraging me to believe that my memory might be a true one after all. I sat and imagined myself waving to my future self. Are those memories now memories of memories? Sometimes I think I can recall a musty smell, sometimes see the corner of the bedspread where the dog peed, or the ragged wallpaper I had idly scraped from the wall one night as I lay in bed. But these memories may be of other times, a kind of interference signal that has, over the years, attached itself to that original manufactured scene. I think I can still find that child, felt from the inside rather than seen from the outside; the child who was terrified that I might no longer be me, terrified that somewhere along the way the child-me would die. I wave now to that child, yet what has survived most potently is the memory and feeling of that colour orange.