Memory as an Illusion, Though a Helpful One
By: Jimmy Cerone
Tags: Ideas, Healing, Memory, Book Club, Waking The Tiger

Idea of the Day #44 | Book Club Edition

Memory as an Illusion, Though a Helpful One

Photo by sarandy westfall on Unsplash

Bergson was years ahead of his time with his assertion that the brain’s function is not to preserve the past. — Waking the Tiger

When I first heard these words come over the speakers of my car at 1.5X speed, I thought I’d misheard them.

Memory is for remembering things, what else could it be for? What is our memory if not a record of our past.

Yet after listening to this section of Waking the Tiger, I realize it isn’t so simple.

I should have known it wasn’t so simple years ago, when my brother and I would disagree over the facts of a childhood incident. Was it on Acorn St or Bloomville Blvd that we found that basketball? Was it me or him that asked Peyton Manning for his autograph?

Most of us can remember a time when our memories failed us, yet we still insist that memories are fact.

The Goal

I hope that by the end of this article, you have a clearer understanding of memory as useful, rather than accurate. It is occasionally accurate, but it is more often useful, serving some purpose, even if we can’t perceive it.

The Quick Version

Memories are organized by feelings, not facts There is no hard drive in your head where memories live Feelings determine what you store in memory You can create new memories to better deal with trauma

The Long Version

1. Memories Are Organized By Feeling, Not Fact

Rather than recording a linear sequence of events, memory is more like playing with Mr. Potato Head. Depending on how it feels at the time, the mind selects from colors, images, sounds, smells, interpretations, and responses with similar arousal and feeling tones, then brings them to the foreground in various combinations to produce what we call memory. As it relates to survival, memory is a particular type of perception; it is not an accurate imprint of an event. — Waking the Tiger

In a terrific metaphor, Levine & Frederick liken the memory to a library with different floors associated with different states of arousal. When you are feeling highly aroused (in the physiological sense, not the sexual one), your mind searches for “memories” that are stored on the high arousal floor.

When you are searching for a memory while in a comparably calm state, your mind will hunt around the calmer (non-aroused) floor of the library for matching memories.

Thus, the brain’s process of remembrance is not driven by fact collection, but feeling collection.

2. There is no hard drive in your head where memories live

In spite of the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars and the efforts of some of science’s brightest minds, little evidence has ever been found of a complete memory that has its own location in the brain. — Waking the Tiger

Your memory is not a little hard drive in your head.

From reading Waking the Tiger, I’m not quite sure what it is. One of my consistent frustrations with an otherwise wonderful book is it’s lack of “scientific” explanations. Levine & Frederick did not seem to use common anatomical terms and instead opted for vague words like “energy”. While I can see how this keeps this general and focused on trauma and not anatomy, I was frustrated many times trying to explain these radical ideas to friends while using their foggy terms.

Unfortunately, when Levine & Frederick came forward with the ground bending claim that there is no single place in your brain where memory is kept, they failed to propose an alternative.

After a little digging on the internet, I found research that confirmed my hunch: memory is distributed. Different types of memory are stored in different places. For example, it’s thought that working memory is stored in the prefrontal cortex (the uniquely human part of our brain).

3. Feelings determine what you store in memory

Emotional feelings are essential for the experience of remembering. — Waking the Tiger

To remember, you must feel. In one study Levine & Frederick cite, juvenile offenders only learned new behaviors when there was an, “emotional tone associated with their perceptions.”

In confusing science speak, this means that:

“some affective (emotional) or motivational significance to a perception may be…the precondition for the perception to be consciously experienced or recalled and may imply that all consciously perceived events must assume some kind of affective dimension, if ever so slight.” — Waking the Tiger

So, though they seem unconnected, the ability to feel and the ability to remember are intertwined.

In a recent Tim Ferris Show episode featuring Adam Grant’s podcast WorkLife, memory is discussed in depth.

Specifically, Grant talks about the book Moonwalking with Einstein, which tells the story of an absent minded journalist who became a world champion in memory competitions in just a year.

The podcast details how you can associate extreme images (which are typically emotional) with facts to help remember them. On the podcast, the author gives an example, chatting about how he remembers to pick up milk at the store:

And so what I do, if I’m, let’s say, memorizing a shopping list, and I have to remember that the first item on the list is milk, say, I walk in that house and I would picture myself pouring a gallon of milk, maybe over my mother’s head in that entryway of the house. And I’d picture the dairy dripping down her head, and what that would smell like, and how she would be really annoyed about it. The more emotion and color you can attach to that image, the more likely it is that when I walk back through that house again later, I will be like, “Oh, right, yes, in the foyer of the Foer house is my mother dripping with milk, I have to pick up milk from the grocery store. — Joshua Foer on WorkLife with Adam Grant

Foer’s example shows that updating our views of memory can have real benefits in our lives.

4. You can create memories to better deal with trauma¹

Not only can we remember better, we can better deal with trauma.

As Levine & Frederick note, letting go of a literal interpretation of memories allows us to renegotiate our trauma effectively. The renegotiation of trauma, according to Levine & Frederick at least:

Occurs when the adaptive resources of the person increase simultaneously with the arousal. In moving from the periphery of the experience to the freezing “shock core”, his unresolved freezing patterns were neutralized by flexible and resolvable patterns as the activation increased. — Waking the Tiger

In their view, a big part of increasing “adaptive resources” is intentionally forming new memories to break out of old patterns, which requires the view that they are flexible. The implication, stated clearly, is as follows:

When we allow ourselves to create a “memory” that is not necessarily literal, as did Margaret, Marius and many others, we give ourselves permission to heal. — Waking the Tiger

So not only can we remember things better by tying strong emotions to certain facts or items, we can help ourselves heal from trauma by renegotiating our memories and creating new ones.

Summary