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THE FABRIC OF MEMORY

Memories are made of this …

To comprehend the nature of traumatic memory, it is necessary to step back from the precipitous brink of the “memory wars” and begin to tease out the various component strands that when woven together form the multi-textured fabric of what we call “memory.” Broadly speaking, there are two types of memory: those that are explicit and those that are implicit, the former being conscious and the latter relatively unconscious. These two memory systems—each of which has at least two broad subcategories—serve separate functions and are mediated by distinct neuro-anatomical brain structures. At the same time, they are meant to guide us (see Figure 2.1) as we navigate life’s various situations and challenges.

Explicit Memory: Declarative and Episodic

Well, I do declare!

—SCARLETT O’HARA, GONE WITH THE WIND

Declarative memories are the most familiar subtype of explicit memory. They are a catalogue of detailed data, the laundry and shopping lists of the memory world. Declarative memories allow us to consciously remember things and to tell reasonably factual stories about them, stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. Most lay persons, as well as many therapists, tend to think of memory primarily as this concrete form. It is only this one reified type of memory that we can actively and deliberately call up or declare. The general role of declarative memories is to communicate discrete pieces of information to other individuals. These “semantic” memories are objective and devoid of feelings and emotions. Without declarative memory there would be no cars, airplanes, computers, email, smartphones, bicycles, skateboards, or even pens. Indeed, there would be no books. Without it, fire probably wouldn’t have been utilized and spread throughout the world, and we would still be helplessly huddled in damp, dark caves. In short, civilization as we know it wouldn’t exist.

Declarative memories are relatively orderly, neat, and tidy, like the highly structured cerebral cortex that they use for their hardware and operating system. While declarative memories are the most conscious and voluntary of the memory systems, they are, by far, the least compelling and enlivening. For the purpose of in-depth psychodynamic approaches, declarative memories are, by themselves, rarely therapeutically relevant. Yet in contrast, they are the basic component of many cognitive and behavioral interventions.

If declarative memory is characterized as “cold” factual information, episodic memory—a second form of explicit memory—would be, in contrast, “warm” and textured. Episodic memories are often infused with feeling tones and vitality, whether of positive or negative valence, and richly encode our personal life experiences. They form a dynamic interface between the “rational” (explicit/declarative) and “irrational” (implicit/emotional) realms. This intermediary function promotes the formation of coherent narratives, the poignant stories that we tell to ourselves and others and which help us make sense of our lives. The linking and processing of raw emotion, nuanced feeling, fact, and communication with chosen others is essential in moving from trauma—with a future barely different from the past—to an open future built upon new experiences, information, and possibilities.

Figure 2.1. Basic Memory Systems

Remembrance of Things Past

Episodic memory (sometimes called autobiographical), rather than being called up deliberately, emerges somewhat spontaneously as representative vignettes from our lives. These memories generally convey a vague feeling tone, often infused with a dreamlike quality. On the awareness hierarchy, these autobiographical reminiscences are less conscious than the “shopping list” type of declarative memories, but more conscious—as we shall see—than implicit memories. In general, episodic memories have more felt nuance and an oblique capacity for ambiguity than do the declarative (factual) memories. When we focus our attention in their general direction, we can hazily drift with episodic memories, in and out of recollection. While these memories are sometimes indistinct and vague, they may in other instances have an eidetic, vivid, lifelike quality. Episodic memories are more spontaneous, interesting, and enlivening than the “laundry list” declarative ones. They frequently have an important, though often subterranean, influence on our lives.

A personal example of an episodic memory is the recollection I have of walking home from my first day of fifth grade at P.S. 94 in the Bronx. I remember talking with my friends about how terrible my new teacher was. A gentle tap on my right shoulder interrupted the drone of my exaggerated and premature grievances. My stomach dropped as I turned to see the gray-haired Mrs. Kurtz. “Do you think I am really that bad?” she queried, tipping her head as she eyed me quizzically. This story had a happy ending, as Mrs. Kurtz turned out to be the best teacher I had in elementary school, and I welcome this episodic memory back with a quality of rueful fondness. And though I would be hard-pressed to recall anything else about my fifth grade year, this recollection somehow encapsulates and represents that entire turnaround year for me. It certainly doesn’t twist my gut as it did then when I first felt her hand on my shoulder.

As mentioned before, in looking back on that year, other than this one memory of Mrs. Kurtz, I have almost no voluntary recall. Indeed, I have only a few scattered memories from grades one through six, and most of those are very unpleasant. All of my other teachers were singularly uninspiring, and some were even cruel and sadistic. Rather than embodying the Latin root for education (educare: to bring up or to draw out), my basic grade school experience (“model”) of education was that of having subjects shoved down my gullet. I hated school and school hated me!

The episodic memory of Mrs. Kurtz evolved into a substantive part of my personal, autobiographical narrative. It became the way I understand, and tell others about, this period in my life. Though initially hidden from me, the memory of Mrs. Kurtz came to function as a kind of pivot, an inflection point, away from an otherwise oppressive, dreary “learning” experience. It catalyzed the creation of a new composite memory, one where learning could be positive and even fun. This allowed for a newly felt belief system, one that extended through my future education and into today’s vocation and avocations.

After the fifth grade and through high school (a dangerous and violent place, rampant with knife-wielding Bronx gangs), I found four positive mentors in science and in math. Then in college, I found several more inspiring teachers who supported my interest in research. This continued through graduate school, where I attracted important mentors both inside and outside of UC Berkeley, where I did my graduate work. These intellectual guides included Donald Wilson, Nikolas Tinbergen, Ernst Gellhorn, Hans Selye, and Raymond Dart, all of whom took me under their wings. Subsequently, throughout my development as a body/mind therapist, I was enriched by the grace of more giving, caring, and challenging teachers and therapists, including Ida Rolf and Charlotte Selvers. And now, I find the roles have been reversed, as I am the mentor to hundreds of students. They are in turn guides to their students, who extend their healing influence to thousands of others.

Thank you, Mrs. Kurtz. Thank you for your warmth, your humor, your joy, and your excitement about the world of learning, and for providing a vital episodic memory that drew me to my mentors and them to me. I am convinced that your gentle, friendly touch on my right shoulder over sixty years ago helped change the direction of my life; in fact, I believe it transformed it in ways that I now contemplate with wonder and gratitude. In this very manner, episodic memories can play an important role in creating positive futures. With each subsequent recollection, the memory becomes enriched, making it ever more meaningful. This natural updating is how memories are meant to operate and how they exert their enlivening functions, often just under the threshold of conscious awareness.

Episodic memory helps us to orient in time and space, culling from the past and projecting advantageous outcomes into the future. Most of what we know about this kind of memory comes, of course, from the verbal reports of humans, like mine of Mrs. Kurtz. However, even the “lowly” jaybird exhibits strong evidence of episodic-like memory. Clayton and Dickinson, in their work with the Western scrub jay,10 were able to demonstrate that these birds possess an episodic-like memory system, one offering a robust survival advantage. This avian species was clearly not only able to remember where they had stashed different food types, but they could recover them discriminately. These recalled distinctions depended on the perishability of the item and the time that had elapsed since hiding it. They were able to remember the “what, where, and when” of specific past caching events and were able to draw from and utilize this information at a later time. Such observed actions, according to these and other researchers, meet the clear behavioral criteria for episodic memory. A similar study was carried out on hummingbirds, demonstrating that they were able to recall where certain flowers were located and how recently these sites were visited. In this way they were able to efficiently maximize fresh nectar targets. Other studies have also demonstrated this same type of episodic-like memory in several different species, including rats, honey bees, dolphins, elephants, and of course, various primates.11 Like so many of the behaviors we think of as being purely human, episodic memory turns out to have widespread evolutionary taproots. This kind of recollection is not just available for the musings of poets or by the likes of me, in an appreciation of my fifth-grade teacher.

It is generally believed that our earliest episodic memories extend back to the age of three-and-a-half, when the hippocampus becomes significantly functional. However, there is evidence that they can, in some cases, reach back to even earlier ages. Using my mother’s corroboration, I can safely say that my earliest episodic memory is from when I was about two-and-a-half years old, sitting by a window near my toddler bed, transfixed by a shaft of light penetrating the still quiet of the room. Dancing dust particles sparkled in the translucent beam. I recall my mother suddenly opening the door and interrupting my dreamy fascination with the scintillating light shaft.a Of course, I didn’t know what particles of dust, a light shaft, or scintillation were. It was only much later that I would learn those words and their discriminating definitions. However, that enchanted feeling of sunlit reverie still has a “magical,” animating quality that enlivens me to this day. It is the ongoing richness of that mystical memory that encourages me to linger in the present moment and in the spaciousness of light and quiet. It continues to inform my spiritual journey and is updated with every similar, and synchronous, encounter with my deep inner “Self.”

Implicit Memory: Emotional and Procedural

Differing radically from both the “cold” declarative and the “warm” episodic memories, implicit memories are “hot” and powerfully compelling. In contrast to the conscious explicit memories (including both declarative and episodic recollections) is the broad category of implicit memories. These memories cannot be called up deliberately or accessed as “dreamy” reminiscences. Instead, they arise as a collage of sensations, emotions, and behaviors. Implicit memories appear and disappear surreptitiously, usually far outside the bounds of our conscious awareness. They are primarily organized around emotions and/or skills, or “procedures”—things that the body does automatically (sometimes called “action patterns”). Even though, in reality, emotional and procedural memories comingle, I will first separate these two types of implicit memories for the purpose of clarification. While emotional memories most certainly have a powerful effect on our behaviors, procedural memories frequently have an even deeper influence—for better or worse—in shaping the trajectory of our lives.

Emotional Rudders

Emotions, according to Darwin’s extensive observations, are universal instincts shared by all mammals, a club to which we belong (although we don’t always admit to this affiliation) and from which we derive similar instincts. These “mammal-universal” emotions include surprise, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and joy. I would like to humbly suggest including curiosity, excitement, gladness, and triumph in this collection of innate (“felt-sense”) emotions.

The function of emotional memory is to flag and encode important experiences for immediate and potent reference later on. Like bookmarks, emotions are charged signals that select a particular procedural memory out of a book of possible motor memories. They prompt organizing themes for action. In this way, emotional memories interface, well below the level of conscious awareness, with procedural (“body”) memories. (See Figure 2.2, insert here.) Emotions provide both relevant survival- and social-based data to inform appropriate responses in any given situation, especially where trying to figure it out mentally would be far too slow and likely off the mark. As such, these memories are vitally important to our individual well-being and that of species survival. It is crucial to appreciate that emotional memories are experienced in the body as physical sensations. Indeed, we see in figure 2.3 clear somatic patterns for each of the primary emotions.

Emotional memories are generally triggered by features of a present situation in which there are similar types and intensities of emotions. These emotions had, in the past, evoked procedural memories, i.e. survival-based actions (fixed action patterns). While such action responses are often successful strategies, in the case of trauma, they were decidedly and tragically unsuccessful. Such maladaptive, habitual reactions leave the individual entangled in unresolved emotional angst, disembodiment, and confusion. However, let’s first get a glimpse of the central role played by positive emotions in our shared social humanity.

How Do You Know What I Know about What I Know about You …

If your everyday practice is to open to your emotions, to all the people you meet, to all the situations you encounter, without closing down, trusting that you can do that—then that will take you as far as you can go. And then you’ll understand all the teachings that anyone has ever taught.

—PEMA CHÖDRÖN, BUDDHIST TEACHER

Starting well before Darwin, and extending to the present, countless arrays of theories on emotion have been generated, promoted, abandoned, and eventually discarded. These schemas encompass philosophical, biological, developmental, psychological, and sociological hypotheses. Simply put, however, socially based emotions serve two primary purposes: The first is to signal to others what we are feeling and needing, and the second is to signal to ourselves what we are feeling and needing. This dual function allows two individuals to co-participate in each other’s feelings. It is an intimate sharing of internal worlds that is sometimes referred to as “inter-subjectivity.” This type of emotional “resonance” lets me know what you are feeling as well as what I am feeling. We share this connection because our facial and postural expressions of these emotions signal these states to others—but also because the patterned feedback to our brain from receptors in our activated facial and postural muscles (along with feedback from our autonomic nervous system) provides us with the inner feeling of those expressions.

As higher-order functions, emotions let us share what we are feeling about each other, sensing each other’s needs and guiding our interactive engagement. From a baby’s first cries and smiles to a toddler’s trumpeted exhilarations and temper tantrums, from an adolescent’s flirtations to an adult’s intimate conversations, emotions are a concise form of relational exchange, a primal knowing. Hence, the central role of social emotions is to facilitate our relationship to ourselves and to others. It is also the way we cooperate and how we convey social norms.

Emotions have the potential to connect us to deep parts of ourselves; they are part of the inner prompting that tells us what we need. They are the basis of how we relate to ourselves and get to know ourselves. They are an important part of the connection to our inner knowing, our inner voice, our intuition—to who we really are. Emotions connect us to the very core of how we experience ourselves, with our aliveness, vitality, and purposeful direction in life. Indeed, one of the most vexing “psychological” conditions is alexithymia, the inability to connect with, name, and communicate our emotions. This troubling condition is often associated with trauma,12 and it leaves its sufferers in a state of demoralizing numbness, as if they were “the walking dead.”

Let us next turn our attention to the deepest strata of memory, the embedded layer of procedural memories.

Figure 2.2. Interrelationship between Memory Systems

Figure 2.3. Emotional Bodily Signatures (Source: Lauri Nummenmaa, Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari, and Jari. K. Hietanen, “Bodily Maps of Emotions,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 2 (January 2014): 646–651, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1321664111.)

a. This was verified by my mother. She recalls it well because it was the age I was when we had just moved to a new apartment and I had my own room. Indeed, she remembers seeing me transfixed by the shaft of light.