Rewriting the Past

The Malleability of Memory

While writing the booklet for the Trauma Sensitive Yoga Deck for Kids, I discovered I know very little about  human memory formation, and some of the things I learned are hard to forget (Ha-ha). We’ll explore the science behind memory making, and the implications for writers and other humans, in future newsletters.

Today, I’m honing in on the one fact that really grabbed me, confused me, and made perfect sense.

Say we want to retrieve a memory from storage—because we’re trying to place ourselves back in the condo of the automatic writer (a species of psychic) we visited circa 1994. Was the psychic’s couch decorated with cabbage rose patterned fabric? Or did she just seem flowery? Was her hair really a helmet of Aqua Net? Did she look as old as I imagine my younger self  believed she was? I remember writing her a check. The rest is murky.

A couch that evokes the feeling of sitting on a cabbage rose couch in a condo, early 1990s. loveproperty.com

In composing the above paragraph, I’ve messed with this particular memory a few times. I had already messed with it last week when I was writing out the scene. The net effect of all this mucking around? My memory of visiting an automatic writer for a psychic reading is no longer the same memory my brain packed into cold storage.

Every time we take a memory out to look at it, we change it. By writing the memory, I rewrote it.

Imagine yourself in a place experiencing a thing. It’s being uploaded, complete with smells, feeling tone, physical sensation. Imagine yourself in the now, fully committed to the mindfulness practice you can’t commit to, aware of all the angles and shapes of the present moment. This was, I thought, how memory formation worked. It was a tricked out video camera. Moments, seamlessly captured, rushed to storage. Easily retrieved.  

The process of information retention, or making memories (in the wildly simplified characterization that follows), has three parts: encoding, or taking in information and altering it for the next step; storage, or how much encoded information is retained; and retrieval, or accessing what we’ve stored. Of the memories stored in our brains, a very small fraction are accessible through conscious effort.

I flatter myself if I believe I can reenter a snapshot—the automatic writer memory. It has degraded with time and examination. I am reduced to best guesses, historic recreations. Unnecessary Google searches. Perhaps contacting the friend who drove me to the psychic’s condo in Bellevue, Washington. She’ll remember it differently.

In terms of my work in progress, which explores our insatiable and ongoing fascination with psychics, I’m shuffling through dark woods without a flashlight. Open to detours and overly susceptible to the input of others, because I’m not yet sure what I want to say. Welcome to draft two. For now, I won’t contact the friend for her version of events or concern myself with the mirage of objective truth, although I’m marinating in it.

When I think too hard about the malleability of memory, it sparks a petite existential crisis and newfound appreciation for that thing people say that used to make me cringe: “It’s my truth.” Indeed. My truth is all I have and all I can vouch for. And it’s going to change over time.

So, is objective truth a thing? I wonder whether this question matters as much as I think it should.

I recently finished reading Here Is Real Magic by Nate Staniforth, a memoir by a magician who, by virtue of losing his mojo, discovers that magic tricks are merely vehicles that give us access to awe. Real magic is everywhere, when we attune to our lives and let go of our need to feel safe in the knowledge that we’re immune to surprise—a cramped state of mind. In order to figure all of this out, Staniforth must travel to India. There, he meets the Poet Laureate of New Delhi, Amit, who calls out the author’s self-righteous scorn for India’s itinerant holy men who “dupe” the “ignorant” by using tricks to produce “miracles.”

Lack of information, aka ignorance, according to Amit, is okay and it’s also kind of normal. He says:

 “Magic—your magic, the magic of magicians—delights us because it gives us a moment of not knowing, an island moment of wonderment, and joy, and innocence. It reminds us that it’s okay not to have all the answers or all the information—that we can move on with our lives anyway. And that we should, because we will never have enough information.”

We rewrite a memory each time we take it out to examine it. Memory fades with time. There are as many versions of an event as witnesses. Some aspects of a memory will remain hidden and unrecoverable. The definitive version of whatever it is you’re writing is out there. It’ll never be finished. So you get to decide when its true enough to stop writing.