Chapter II – Our Memories
Stories have many forms, especially considering the passing of time.
There are fairy tales we were told when we were children, novels that we read when we were teens. As we became older, the kinds of stories changed according to our tastes and preferences.
Sometimes we think we remembered the real or first version of a story, but is that even possible? Or does the brain convince itself that the story it remembered must be true?
How well do we even remember in the first place?
One of the most notable researchers on the topic of memory was Frederic Bartlett. He was recognised for ‘Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology’ (Bartlett, 1932)
His research was focused on perception and memory as they occur in real life, rather than the associationist theories of perception, learning, memory and thinking that dominated the field of research at the time, referring to Hermann Ebbinghaus’ studies on the topic.
Ebbinghaus was known for studying the workings of memory by conducting his research using himself as the test subject. He created nonsense syllables, 2300 of them, to measure the formation of mental associations. For his research he wrote these syllables on cards and in short the experiment went as follows: at a fixed time of the day Ebbinghaus would take out a few of these cards, write down the syllables and then he took a piece of string on which were wooden beads, the tenth bead being black of colour and he would take this string with the beads through his fingers. The next step was to read the series of syllables to himself, with two to three syllables per second, until he knew the exact order of the syllables by heart. He would repeat the same series of syllables at varying intervals. This could be twenty minutes, a day, a week or even an entire month after the initial test. Out of his research he concluded that memory is orderly. (Draaisma, 2001/2016) Ebbinghaus’ findings were not limited to this research, he also included the “forgetting curve” that relates forgetting to the passage of time, as reported in Über das Gedächtnis (Ebbinghaus, 1885)
And so, Ebbinghaus’ says that repetition is key in remembering, but perhaps remembering by associations of a story would speed up the process rather than using this constant need for repetition.
In this video Ricardo Lieuw takes us through such a process and executes it with a test for the audience. He then explains how and why it works to remember stories, specifically for studying purposes.
But, what if two people are present at a certain time, a certain place, during the event which the stories stem from. Both of these people have remembered different parts of this story, because not one person is the same. And so, different iterations of the same story are born.
How does this happen? Is it just our memory failing us? Is it the many people that tell these stories that leave out important details? Did they simply misremember? Maybe they confused one story with another and somehow a combination of those two stories was created.
Would there be a way to uncover the truth about these stories? What if you ask the source, or at least one of the people that was present during the event, will their memory be good enough to recognize truth from false narratives?
If you put the two versions of a story together, do you then get the truth? The whole story? Or a new, entirely different story that is much different than the initial one?
As an example: there are memories, or stories rather, that my older brother and I remember differently. Is it because I was younger and not as sharp to remember details? Or is it because different humans have different interests, thus remembering different things? This reminded me of an article on neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. He tells us a story from his life that similarly questions our autobiographic memory.
“I spoke of these bombing incidents to my brother Michael. Michael is five years my senior, and had been with me at Braefield, the boarding school to which we had been evacuated at the beginning of the war. My brother immediately confirmed the first bombing incident, saying, “I remember it exactly as you described it.” But regarding the second bombing, he said, “You never saw it. You weren’t there.”
I was staggered by Michael’s words. How could he dispute a memory I would not hesitate to swear on in a court of law, and had never doubted as real? “What do you mean?” I objected. “I can see the bomb in my mind’s eye now, Pa with his pump, and Marcus and David with their buckets of water. How could I see it so clearly if I wasn’t there?” “You never saw it,” Michael repeated. “We were both away at Braefield at the time. But David [our older brother] wrote us a letter about it. A very vivid, dramatic letter. You were enthralled by it.” Clearly, I had not only been enthralled, but must have constructed the scene in my mind, from David’s words, and then appropriated it, and taken it for a memory of my own."
— Oliver Sacks quoted in the literateape article.
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This anecdote shows that our autobiographic memory can sometimes be tricked into believing that a memory is our own, when it is not. I believe, however, that this can not merely be a mistake in memorising an event. There must be a reason behind it. As mentioned before, Ebbinghaus’ studies show how memory works using associationist theories rather than events that could happen in real life. So, Bartlett’s research was executed differently, by using figures, photographs and stories.
His most famous study was the “War of Ghosts” experiment. The participants of the study were to read a Canadian Indian Folklore titled “War of Ghosts” and needed to remember the story in as much detail as they could after reading it in extended intervals and for numerous repetitions. The result was astonishing, the Edwardian English participants implemented their own culture into the story when they tried to re-formulate the story presented to them. They omitted or modified details in such a way that the story would fit in their own culture scheme. Such schemas are commonly considered organised structures that help you to remember something and easily recall it later (Roediger & DeSoto, 2015). It demonstrated how destructive our memory can be. We can conclude by this experiment that the participants tried to put the story from a different culture into their own culture as to understand the content and place it into a context that is familiar to them.
Thus, memories are images that can affect and be affected by social influences.
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People become the carrier for the story and they add their own context. After that, they release their version of the story into the world and so the cycle continues. We already mentioned an example of this in the previous chapter with Ashurbanipal changing the story of Gilgamesh.
Furthermore, schemes could be compared to adaptations, the memory becomes a false reconstruction of the actual reality. Bartlett thought that our memories of the past are often merely reconstructions instead of the truth. (Ost & Costall, 2002)
Walter Benjamin argues that, with time, a story that is based on experience offer no meaning for the future. Benjamin describes this as poverty of experience: experience is no longer transferable from generation to generation, because the wise lessons that your grandfather might tell you becomes outdated and of no value in this ever-changing world. (The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov) Benjamin goes into storytelling rather than memory, but there is a connection between the two.
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The memories are there, they might need to surface from the subconscious with the use of triggers like seeing a picture, smells or taste. (Draaisma, 2001/2016, p. 37) The memories surface and the stories get told, whether that is in our own context or in the context of an older generation should not matter, as the individual listening to the story will place the story into their own context, their own scheme, regardless of the content of the story.
“Thus, traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel.” -Walter Benjamin
How does this happen in our daily lives? How do we re-live memories when we are older?
As Douwe Draaisma says in this video, photographs are there to serve our memories, to help us remind ourselves of the events in our lives that have already passed. Although he goes deeper into post-mortem photography, his point that photos help our mind remember is clear. Yet, the mention of remembering the photograph better than the actual event is an interesting input that I had not thought of before. I thought that a photograph was just a shortcut for a memory to resurface momentarily. Like photos on an old hard drive, you know that you have them saved somewhere, but you do not actively think about them all the time.
I wanted to see for myself what kind of memories would surface when two individuals looked at the same photographs. Here is an example of an older generation looking at photos taken from ±1930s, which is around the time they were born, until ±2001.
Observing them, I noticed that Pépé is looking at the family albums in a much different way than Mémé. However, we cannot disregard that it might have to do with characteristics of the individual. While looking at the photos, Pépé talks about the occasion and the people above all else, including details of where the photos were taken, including stories from the military.
Mémé on the other hand, silently looks at the photographs. The only moment she speaks is to let out a flurry of names of the ladies and gentlemen in the photos.
Pépé commenting on a photo of his dad
Mémé mentioning the names of all women in on the photos
Pépé saying "She has a big memory"
It is remarkable to see how well we remember, yet how different people focus on such different details when it comes to photographs. Meaning they must have different schemes from one another, just like what Bartlett refers to.
Pépé instantly starts mentioning who is in the photos during what time period in the army and where they were stationed. This clip is to clearly show how much he talks regarding his photo album in comparison to Mémé. She looked through the photo albums for more than 30 minutes and the clip that you see was the only instance she commented on the photos.
After knowing all these theories on memory and after reading the book ‘Why life speeds up as you get older’ (Draaisma, 2001/2016)
I noticed that with each piece of information and anecdotes told, a bunch of my own memories started flooding back. Memories from the beginning of my youth, sad and traumatic experiences as well as joyful ones and then I started to doubt myself...
Are these memories even my own? Or did I take stories that were told to me on as my own memories?
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Does everyone have that same experience?
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