What a fascinating observation about different types of memories! I think you're onto something really interesting about the distinction between isolated facts (like names) and rich episodic memories. It does seem like false memories are more likely to be about the details when there's a broader context to work with.
I wonder if this has something to do with how our brains make predictions. When we're trying to remember a name, there's not much context to work with. But with a childhood memory, our brains have lots of related experiences and knowledge to draw from when reconstructing the memory.
That's an interesting perspective about slower-moving times! Do you think we're more likely to form false memories today than in slower-moving times? The sheer volume of information we process daily might make this especially relevant to think about.
I agree with your point here. But I wonder if there are some opposing forces at play, too. The internet doesn't just amplify misinformation - it also connects us to much larger networks of people who can fact-check and correct our misconceptions. Maybe we were just as wrong in the past, but had fewer ways to discover it?
I'm no neurologist, but a " padded ", " softened / cushioned " memory system WOULD SEEM to cover a multitude of sins - or just uncomfortable, unpleasant, realities. I'm convinced that looking at childhood & youth though rosy - tinted shades can actually be a panacea.
Having had training in interrogative interviewing and been around for the moral panics surrounding satanic cults, children and other unsavoury traumatic experiences, I like your article and commend Dr Loftus’s work and her weighty corpus on FMS. It seems true to me as well after years of interviewing and preparing legal submissions. That, if you like, is my ethos in this matter. Her “Victims of Memory” was published in the mid ‘90s at a time when a new version of the “memory wars” had arisen - still worth reading imo. Anyway, suffice to say that eyewitness testimony convinces jurors but is unbelievably malleable and misleading in the best intentioned of people - we write our own stories and constantly revise them. I’m surprised you didn’t mention any films on this topic! Thanks again, Suzi.
Oh, yes, there are so many movies that would have been great to discuss on this one. I'd be curious which ones you were thinking about, Inception perhaps, or maybe Brainstorm?
I guess I think about Total Recall , Memento and imho the execrable Shutter Island (which I would like to forget - but everyone has different opinions, I acknowledge that). What about you? Any in addition to the two above?
Mine are on different kinds of memory problems as well as unreliable recall of course.
Yes, Memento and Total Recall, for sure! Shutter Island is a good example, too. I was also thinking about Mulholland Drive -- I love the way David Lynch visualises memory in that movie.
When writing this post, I was thinking a lot about Borges' short story, Funes the Memorious.
Although it got mixed reviews, I liked "The Final Cut", which starred Robin Williams in a serious role. Per Wikipedia:
The Final Cut is a 2004 science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by Omar Naim. It stars Robin Williams, Jim Caviezel, Mira Sorvino, Mimi Kuzyk, Stephanie Romanov, Genevieve Buechner and Brendan Fletcher. The film takes place in a setting where brain implants make it possible to record the sight and sound of entire lives. Williams plays a professional who specializes in editing the memories of unsavory people into uncritical memorials that are played at funerals.
Speaking of "moral panics surrounding satanic cults", I remember the McMartin preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California, as a particularly outrageous example that went on for several years before all charges were dropped. Was there anything at all to that case besides hysteria fueled mostly by the testimonies of children who were intimidated/bribed into recalling abuses that never happened?
I've generally worked around to seeing memory (specifically episodic memory) as a causal simulation of past events. In this way, they are the same as imagining hypothetical scenarios with an asterisk that they're about an actual past event. That's why it's so easy to cross between them, or have them blend together. As you discuss, it's more about decisions we have in front of us rather than what happened in the past.
I have similar false memories. I vividly remember me and my cousin as children playing in the back of my aunt's SUV, even though SUVs weren't a big thing yet in the 1970s and it almost certainly would have been in a station wagon instead. Or I remember work events taking place in my office, but years before I had that office. It makes a lot more sense if these are actually imagining the past rather than archival retrievals.
I'm so fascinated by the idea that we can have a false memory and know that it's false, but still continue to remember it falsely even though we know it's false. We can't correct it. That's just really strange.
Your example of the SUV/station wagon is great -- even when you logically know it must have been a station wagon, your brain stubbornly holds onto the SUV version.
What a useful insight: My brain digs up just enough relevant info to do what it needs to do right now.
It makes me think about a piano virtuoso who needs to recall an entire piano concerto and dish it up in complete synch with the orchestra. Think of the dexterity, the touch, the weight, the pedal, the emotion, the tempo, the timbre, the hearing, the drama.... That's not just little bits of relevant info, that's, that's, that's, incredible!
This always fascinates me. How one person can remember so much, to the delight of their audience. I wonder if this has to do with how people can play around with structures. I know almost nothing about music. But I suppose I can assume written music is structured, the reason why people can remember it. When a virtuoso plays, they build structures upon structures on top of the written music. These being their own structures, they have no problem remembering them. Things you discover / invent you don't forget.
Learning music has more to do with what's casually called "muscle memory", where you don't actively think about what you're doing. That's why the virtuoso has bundled the concerto as a whole. It's like the old joke about the centipede, who was walking just fine until someone asked how he managed all those legs.
I think you're onto something important here. The structure of music has a lot to do with why we remember it. Music is highly predictive. Even a piece of music that we have never heard before has a predictive structure. There are certain notes or cords that when followed by other notes and cords, sound 'right' and then other notes and cords that sound 'wrong'. There are also temporal elements to music that make it predictable.
The music we love tends to be predictive but also surprising -- but only if it is not too surprising.
Bach was a genius at this. So was James Brown. They establish clear expectations - a distinctive rhythmic pattern and melody that our brains quickly learn to predict -- but then suddenly, they introduce notes or rhythm outside the expected. This surprise creates harmonic tensions we didn't see coming, yet it feels perfectly natural and delightful.
Something I also find fascinating about music is that music is often the last memory to go. Those with dementia often remember music from their childhood. And those who have severe memory loss (like Clive Wearing, who had complete retrograde amnesia) still remember how to play. It's fascinating.
Wyrd Smythe makes a great point here -- 'muscle memory' has a lot to do with it. But there might also be something special about music. There is an area of the human brain that is particularly responsive to the patterns we find in music. This area has not been found in other animals.
Most fascinating. From what you are saying, music is a self-unfolding cipher. Multiple to clues to let you know what is just around the corner and surprises to add to the excitement. No wonder it can take over an audience however large. What better adventure to lose oneself in! No Sherlock Holmes story can match up.
Fine piece. If ever the saying “it’s a feature, not a bug” applied to anything, it’s to our multiple memory systems. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the adaptive value of a memory system (sensory memory) that in many cases lasts for less than a second, the very limited capacity and duration of short-term memory, the “susceptibility” of long-term memory to errors due to its reconstructive nature. Boy, evolution sure botched things! To students who suggested we’d be a lot better off if we just encoded everything as soon as we saw or heard or thought it, I heartily recommended that they read Jorge Luis Borges’ wonderful short story “Funes the Memorious”, about a man who could forget nothing:
“We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. These memories were not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: "I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world." And again: "My dreams are like you people's waking hours." And again, toward dawn: "My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap." A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge -- all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake.”
So you're saying my childhood memory of teaming up with Batman to rescue Peppa Pig from being kidnapped by Santa might not be real? That's, like, my entire identity!
Speaking of perfect memories though, I wonder how it feels to be one of those few people in the world who can recall every single detail from any day of their lives. Can they turn it on/off on demand? In that case, I can see it being useful.
Or do the memories just kind of always stay there? Which sounds like a much less fun experience.
Oh, no, the Batman-Peppa-Pig-Santa memory has to be real -- that's too crazy to make up!
This is not my area, but I believe that people with HSAM (highly superior autobiographical memory) can't turn it on and off. So, I think you're right; it's probably not always the gift it might seem to be. They probably feel overwhelmed by their memories, especially difficult ones that they can't forget.
You raise an important point that may have application to Ai and computationalism. Perhaps a certain fuzziness and ambiguity are important to a functioning consciousness.
That's such an interesting connection! It makes me wonder about the role of uncertainty and approximation in not just consciousness but intelligence. Perhaps perfect information processing gives us something we might like to call intelligent, but the fuzzy, imperfect type is closer to human-like intelligence. I wonder what might be lost if we try to make AI systems that aim for perfect recall rather than flexible reconstruction.
Science fiction has occasionally explored the idea of intelligent beings with perfect computer-like memory, and in most cases the author presents it as immobilizing. There is, I think, a huge difference between experiencing information and processing data. As many of your recent posts have emphasized, we perceive (and remember!) reality through a dark, distorting glass, but maybe that's necessary for us to be able to integrate all the input data into perceivable information.
As an aside, our imperfect memory is challenging because so much of our identity is wrapped up in our memories. (But they're memories of memories of memories of...) I think the trick is found in what Emerson said: "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Our identity comes from the sum total of our experiences, who we are now, even if we can't remember quite how we got here.
Have you read the Borges' story Funes the Memorious? The main character falls off a horse and gets a head 'injury' that gives him perfect memory. But it becomes a curse -- he can't abstract or generalize because he's drowning in details. I was thinking about that story a lot this week when I was thinking about how our "dark, distorting glass" of memory might actually be a feature rather than a bug. We create meaning by filtering and condensing experience into usable patterns rather than just storing raw data.
That's a wonderful quote! What matters isn't perfect recall but how experiences shape our way of being in the world.
Yes, I think that’s exactly right. And for me it very much works that way since I have very few memories of my past. Just a few memories of memories of memories of memories. It seems as if my brain isn’t interested in autobiographical details but craves learning about the world and its people. As I’ve put it for many years, I just have no interest in the rearview mirror. The present (let alone some thoughts about the future) consume all my mental CPU cycles. Apparently, I only bother to remember what I consider useful.
That Borges story rings a very faint bell. Might have read it back in college, we did study some of his work at one point. I am very taken with his story “The Library of Babel” and have written about the concepts expressed there a number of times. (Most recently: https://logosconcarne.substack.com/p/welcome-to-story-space)
I had an experience in the nineties where a counselor encouraged me to explore memories of childhood abuse. It seemed so real to me. I even confronted an older family member who I had vivid memories about the abuse.
They denied it but I was unable to process what they were saying. I remembered!
Several years later, I came to realize that what I remembered could not have happened, at least not with the person I thought had instigated the violence.
Realizing that long term memory is fallible has given me an appreciation for the fragility of life. The impermanence. I think our memories are like dreams. They conceal hidden meanings linking them to now.
We got over it. The accused party chalked it up to me being mental. They died in 2020, one week before their one hundredth birthday. Their last 25 years were spent near me. We visited often with them until the end.
They were instrumental in inflicting some of the harm that I endured as a child. As I grew older and saw how hard it was to be a parent… as I watched my son grow older and struggle raising his children, I had much more sympathy for those who parented me.
It took me about 7 years before I stopped trying to get in the wrong side of the car in California. Now I'm back in England, I have to think really hard to remember which side is which.
I used to have a girlfriend who could remember exactly what everyone was wearing, even years later. I can’t even remember what I am wearing now. I could remember exactly what everyone said though. I’ve never studied for an exam* because I always remembered everything.
Now that my memory is fading, it’s fading in very specific areas. I still remember episodes clearly from my childhood (despite what you say in your post) but I can’t remember nouns — especially proper nouns — and I can't make new memories. I wish I understood more about how all this works.
* Except for my Latin O-level. I realised a few months before the exam that I actually didn't know much Latin — so I learned all of the translations off by heart. About 50 of them. I still remember some of them 40 years later.
Thank you for sharing your experience, Ragged Clown.
I wonder if the difference between you and your girlfriend was attention or interest? Was she more interested in fashion, and you more interested in the conversation?
The fact that you remember your childhood memories fits with the research on memory loss. Childhood memories often remain intact, while more recent memory formation becomes difficult. The inability to recall nouns, especially proper nouns, is a classic symptom of temporal lobe dysfunction because this region stores and processes semantic information about objects, people, and places. Would this fit with what you know about your condition?
There is a dangerous dark side to the malleability of our memories. Fake news inspired by strong ideological beliefs can and does change perceptions of historical events. We know full well the effects of this from the propaganda campaigns of twentieth century tyrannical regimes. And contemporary politicians seemed to have learned these lessons well.
Good point! It's scary how easily our memories can be warped, isn't it? The same brain flexibility that helps us learn and adapt can make us surprisingly vulnerable to manipulation. And you make a really important connection to those old propaganda campaigns -- today's politicians seem to be working from the same playbook, just with fancier digital tools at their disposal. What we saw in the 20th century wasn't just a historical anomaly -- it's showing us exactly how fragile our shared understanding of reality can be.
I’m going to take up Matti’s point above, as well as amplify it in my own way. I have a conclusion that Matti might consider reasonable, though it’s pretty radical so he may not.
Consider Donald Trump’s perspective regarding himself. Apparently he believes he’s one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, and that he’s wrongly been persecuted by liberals given his righteous attempts to stop them from destroying America. I suspect that most here agree with me that this delusion nicely displays the tagline of Suzi’s post — “False memories are exactly what you need”. And for anyone who thinks Trump’s perspective on himself isn’t highly deluded, you might substitute a given liberal’s perspective who you actually do consider deluded in order to still assess the following argument.
Much of humanity is ruled by tyrannical governments that are encouraged to persecute some of their people in order to maintain their power. And even though the people of Syria, North Korea, Russia, and so on are forced to suffer in this way, there’s no real worry that such countries will overthrow liberal societies since we wouldn’t stand for it. Instead we hope to someday help free the oppressed. There’s another threat to liberal society that I don’t have an answer for however. This is the mind control that China has been instituting by means of its Social Credit System.
No one seems to talk about their SCS anymore. While there was a time when Chinese officials were quite loose lipped regarding their plan to create a system where all Chinese people would be scored positively to negatively given their already massive government surveillance, and thus citizens would be punished and rewarded in general on the basis of what their scores happened to be, today they deny that their still evolving SCS will ever be used that way. Given all its talk of “misinformation”, I consider it chilling that the current SCS Wikipedia article reads like it was directly written by Chinese officials!
Brutality and oppression is a tool that governments sometimes use to control their people, but history tells us that this also tends to make them rebellious rather than supportive. What if a government were instead to give its people incentives to do economically prosperous and healthy things, as well as penalties for the contrary, and also penalties for criticizing or fighting government rule? It seem to me that if done well such a country ought to become quite wealthy. Not only do I suspect that the Chinese will become extremely wealthy by means of building such a mind control state, but that humanity in general ought to succumb to thus terminate its brief experiment with liberty based governing.
What a fascinating observation about different types of memories! I think you're onto something really interesting about the distinction between isolated facts (like names) and rich episodic memories. It does seem like false memories are more likely to be about the details when there's a broader context to work with.
I wonder if this has something to do with how our brains make predictions. When we're trying to remember a name, there's not much context to work with. But with a childhood memory, our brains have lots of related experiences and knowledge to draw from when reconstructing the memory.
That's an interesting perspective about slower-moving times! Do you think we're more likely to form false memories today than in slower-moving times? The sheer volume of information we process daily might make this especially relevant to think about.
Interesting! And so much of that interweb reality is false to begin with.
I wonder how much our algorithm bubble plays into this.
In terms of creating a false reality, I’d guess tons.
I agree with your point here. But I wonder if there are some opposing forces at play, too. The internet doesn't just amplify misinformation - it also connects us to much larger networks of people who can fact-check and correct our misconceptions. Maybe we were just as wrong in the past, but had fewer ways to discover it?
Or maybe not. The bubble is strong.
I'm no neurologist, but a " padded ", " softened / cushioned " memory system WOULD SEEM to cover a multitude of sins - or just uncomfortable, unpleasant, realities. I'm convinced that looking at childhood & youth though rosy - tinted shades can actually be a panacea.
Having had training in interrogative interviewing and been around for the moral panics surrounding satanic cults, children and other unsavoury traumatic experiences, I like your article and commend Dr Loftus’s work and her weighty corpus on FMS. It seems true to me as well after years of interviewing and preparing legal submissions. That, if you like, is my ethos in this matter. Her “Victims of Memory” was published in the mid ‘90s at a time when a new version of the “memory wars” had arisen - still worth reading imo. Anyway, suffice to say that eyewitness testimony convinces jurors but is unbelievably malleable and misleading in the best intentioned of people - we write our own stories and constantly revise them. I’m surprised you didn’t mention any films on this topic! Thanks again, Suzi.
Thanks, John!
Oh, yes, there are so many movies that would have been great to discuss on this one. I'd be curious which ones you were thinking about, Inception perhaps, or maybe Brainstorm?
I guess I think about Total Recall , Memento and imho the execrable Shutter Island (which I would like to forget - but everyone has different opinions, I acknowledge that). What about you? Any in addition to the two above?
Mine are on different kinds of memory problems as well as unreliable recall of course.
Yes, Memento and Total Recall, for sure! Shutter Island is a good example, too. I was also thinking about Mulholland Drive -- I love the way David Lynch visualises memory in that movie.
When writing this post, I was thinking a lot about Borges' short story, Funes the Memorious.
What a wonderful story. Yes indeed.
Although it got mixed reviews, I liked "The Final Cut", which starred Robin Williams in a serious role. Per Wikipedia:
The Final Cut is a 2004 science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by Omar Naim. It stars Robin Williams, Jim Caviezel, Mira Sorvino, Mimi Kuzyk, Stephanie Romanov, Genevieve Buechner and Brendan Fletcher. The film takes place in a setting where brain implants make it possible to record the sight and sound of entire lives. Williams plays a professional who specializes in editing the memories of unsavory people into uncritical memorials that are played at funerals.
Synchronicity! I mentioned "Brainstorm" (and "Strange Days") in my last post about recordings of mental states: https://logosconcarne.substack.com/p/computation-vs-playback
Added that one to my 'Save' list.
When/If you get a chance to read it, I’d value any feedback you might have!
Speaking of "moral panics surrounding satanic cults", I remember the McMartin preschool case in Manhattan Beach, California, as a particularly outrageous example that went on for several years before all charges were dropped. Was there anything at all to that case besides hysteria fueled mostly by the testimonies of children who were intimidated/bribed into recalling abuses that never happened?
I’m in Scotland and don’t know of this I’m afraid.
Excellent as always Suzi!
I've generally worked around to seeing memory (specifically episodic memory) as a causal simulation of past events. In this way, they are the same as imagining hypothetical scenarios with an asterisk that they're about an actual past event. That's why it's so easy to cross between them, or have them blend together. As you discuss, it's more about decisions we have in front of us rather than what happened in the past.
I have similar false memories. I vividly remember me and my cousin as children playing in the back of my aunt's SUV, even though SUVs weren't a big thing yet in the 1970s and it almost certainly would have been in a station wagon instead. Or I remember work events taking place in my office, but years before I had that office. It makes a lot more sense if these are actually imagining the past rather than archival retrievals.
I love your take on this!
I'm so fascinated by the idea that we can have a false memory and know that it's false, but still continue to remember it falsely even though we know it's false. We can't correct it. That's just really strange.
Your example of the SUV/station wagon is great -- even when you logically know it must have been a station wagon, your brain stubbornly holds onto the SUV version.
What a useful insight: My brain digs up just enough relevant info to do what it needs to do right now.
It makes me think about a piano virtuoso who needs to recall an entire piano concerto and dish it up in complete synch with the orchestra. Think of the dexterity, the touch, the weight, the pedal, the emotion, the tempo, the timbre, the hearing, the drama.... That's not just little bits of relevant info, that's, that's, that's, incredible!
Mind. Blown.
What a fascinating example! It is mind-blowing, isn't it!?
This always fascinates me. How one person can remember so much, to the delight of their audience. I wonder if this has to do with how people can play around with structures. I know almost nothing about music. But I suppose I can assume written music is structured, the reason why people can remember it. When a virtuoso plays, they build structures upon structures on top of the written music. These being their own structures, they have no problem remembering them. Things you discover / invent you don't forget.
Learning music has more to do with what's casually called "muscle memory", where you don't actively think about what you're doing. That's why the virtuoso has bundled the concerto as a whole. It's like the old joke about the centipede, who was walking just fine until someone asked how he managed all those legs.
Haha! Yes, so true
I think you're onto something important here. The structure of music has a lot to do with why we remember it. Music is highly predictive. Even a piece of music that we have never heard before has a predictive structure. There are certain notes or cords that when followed by other notes and cords, sound 'right' and then other notes and cords that sound 'wrong'. There are also temporal elements to music that make it predictable.
The music we love tends to be predictive but also surprising -- but only if it is not too surprising.
Bach was a genius at this. So was James Brown. They establish clear expectations - a distinctive rhythmic pattern and melody that our brains quickly learn to predict -- but then suddenly, they introduce notes or rhythm outside the expected. This surprise creates harmonic tensions we didn't see coming, yet it feels perfectly natural and delightful.
Something I also find fascinating about music is that music is often the last memory to go. Those with dementia often remember music from their childhood. And those who have severe memory loss (like Clive Wearing, who had complete retrograde amnesia) still remember how to play. It's fascinating.
Wyrd Smythe makes a great point here -- 'muscle memory' has a lot to do with it. But there might also be something special about music. There is an area of the human brain that is particularly responsive to the patterns we find in music. This area has not been found in other animals.
Most fascinating. From what you are saying, music is a self-unfolding cipher. Multiple to clues to let you know what is just around the corner and surprises to add to the excitement. No wonder it can take over an audience however large. What better adventure to lose oneself in! No Sherlock Holmes story can match up.
Fine piece. If ever the saying “it’s a feature, not a bug” applied to anything, it’s to our multiple memory systems. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the adaptive value of a memory system (sensory memory) that in many cases lasts for less than a second, the very limited capacity and duration of short-term memory, the “susceptibility” of long-term memory to errors due to its reconstructive nature. Boy, evolution sure botched things! To students who suggested we’d be a lot better off if we just encoded everything as soon as we saw or heard or thought it, I heartily recommended that they read Jorge Luis Borges’ wonderful short story “Funes the Memorious”, about a man who could forget nothing:
“We, at one glance, can perceive three glasses on a table; Funes, all the leaves and tendrils and fruit that make up a grape vine. He knew by heart the forms of the southern clouds at dawn on the 30th of April, 1882, and could compare them in his memory with the mottled streaks on a book in Spanish binding he had only seen once and with the outlines of the foam raised by an oar in the Rio Negro the night before the Quebracho uprising. These memories were not simple ones; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Two or three times he had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had required a whole day. He told me: "I alone have more memories than all mankind has probably had since the world has been the world." And again: "My dreams are like you people's waking hours." And again, toward dawn: "My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap." A circle drawn on a blackboard, a right triangle, a lozenge -- all these are forms we can fully and intuitively grasp; Ireneo could do the same with the stormy mane of a pony, with a herd of cattle on a hill, with the changing fire and its innumerable ashes, with the many faces of a dead man throughout a long wake.”
Enjoying your substack.
The
Thank you so much!
When writing this post, I was thinking a lot about Borges' short story, Funes the Memorious. It's such a great one.
So you're saying my childhood memory of teaming up with Batman to rescue Peppa Pig from being kidnapped by Santa might not be real? That's, like, my entire identity!
Speaking of perfect memories though, I wonder how it feels to be one of those few people in the world who can recall every single detail from any day of their lives. Can they turn it on/off on demand? In that case, I can see it being useful.
Or do the memories just kind of always stay there? Which sounds like a much less fun experience.
Oh, no, the Batman-Peppa-Pig-Santa memory has to be real -- that's too crazy to make up!
This is not my area, but I believe that people with HSAM (highly superior autobiographical memory) can't turn it on and off. So, I think you're right; it's probably not always the gift it might seem to be. They probably feel overwhelmed by their memories, especially difficult ones that they can't forget.
Then it sounds much more like a curse than a gift. Damn.
I think Luria’s “The Mind of a Mnemonist” probably answers your question, Daniel. Not pleasant at all.
You raise an important point that may have application to Ai and computationalism. Perhaps a certain fuzziness and ambiguity are important to a functioning consciousness.
That's such an interesting connection! It makes me wonder about the role of uncertainty and approximation in not just consciousness but intelligence. Perhaps perfect information processing gives us something we might like to call intelligent, but the fuzzy, imperfect type is closer to human-like intelligence. I wonder what might be lost if we try to make AI systems that aim for perfect recall rather than flexible reconstruction.
Science fiction has occasionally explored the idea of intelligent beings with perfect computer-like memory, and in most cases the author presents it as immobilizing. There is, I think, a huge difference between experiencing information and processing data. As many of your recent posts have emphasized, we perceive (and remember!) reality through a dark, distorting glass, but maybe that's necessary for us to be able to integrate all the input data into perceivable information.
As an aside, our imperfect memory is challenging because so much of our identity is wrapped up in our memories. (But they're memories of memories of memories of...) I think the trick is found in what Emerson said: "I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me." Our identity comes from the sum total of our experiences, who we are now, even if we can't remember quite how we got here.
Have you read the Borges' story Funes the Memorious? The main character falls off a horse and gets a head 'injury' that gives him perfect memory. But it becomes a curse -- he can't abstract or generalize because he's drowning in details. I was thinking about that story a lot this week when I was thinking about how our "dark, distorting glass" of memory might actually be a feature rather than a bug. We create meaning by filtering and condensing experience into usable patterns rather than just storing raw data.
That's a wonderful quote! What matters isn't perfect recall but how experiences shape our way of being in the world.
Yes, I think that’s exactly right. And for me it very much works that way since I have very few memories of my past. Just a few memories of memories of memories of memories. It seems as if my brain isn’t interested in autobiographical details but craves learning about the world and its people. As I’ve put it for many years, I just have no interest in the rearview mirror. The present (let alone some thoughts about the future) consume all my mental CPU cycles. Apparently, I only bother to remember what I consider useful.
That Borges story rings a very faint bell. Might have read it back in college, we did study some of his work at one point. I am very taken with his story “The Library of Babel” and have written about the concepts expressed there a number of times. (Most recently: https://logosconcarne.substack.com/p/welcome-to-story-space)
I had an experience in the nineties where a counselor encouraged me to explore memories of childhood abuse. It seemed so real to me. I even confronted an older family member who I had vivid memories about the abuse.
They denied it but I was unable to process what they were saying. I remembered!
Several years later, I came to realize that what I remembered could not have happened, at least not with the person I thought had instigated the violence.
Realizing that long term memory is fallible has given me an appreciation for the fragility of life. The impermanence. I think our memories are like dreams. They conceal hidden meanings linking them to now.
Unhappily this wasn’t uncommon. Usually well meant. I hope it wasn’t too destructive an experience for you and within your family.
We got over it. The accused party chalked it up to me being mental. They died in 2020, one week before their one hundredth birthday. Their last 25 years were spent near me. We visited often with them until the end.
They were instrumental in inflicting some of the harm that I endured as a child. As I grew older and saw how hard it was to be a parent… as I watched my son grow older and struggle raising his children, I had much more sympathy for those who parented me.
It says a lot for you and compassion.
It certainly does. Not everyone would be so.
I’m so sorry this happened to you. I had a good friend in the nineties who went through something similar. It can devastating.
It took me about 7 years before I stopped trying to get in the wrong side of the car in California. Now I'm back in England, I have to think really hard to remember which side is which.
haha! I’m glad it wasn’t just me!
I used to have a girlfriend who could remember exactly what everyone was wearing, even years later. I can’t even remember what I am wearing now. I could remember exactly what everyone said though. I’ve never studied for an exam* because I always remembered everything.
Now that my memory is fading, it’s fading in very specific areas. I still remember episodes clearly from my childhood (despite what you say in your post) but I can’t remember nouns — especially proper nouns — and I can't make new memories. I wish I understood more about how all this works.
* Except for my Latin O-level. I realised a few months before the exam that I actually didn't know much Latin — so I learned all of the translations off by heart. About 50 of them. I still remember some of them 40 years later.
Thank you for sharing your experience, Ragged Clown.
I wonder if the difference between you and your girlfriend was attention or interest? Was she more interested in fashion, and you more interested in the conversation?
The fact that you remember your childhood memories fits with the research on memory loss. Childhood memories often remain intact, while more recent memory formation becomes difficult. The inability to recall nouns, especially proper nouns, is a classic symptom of temporal lobe dysfunction because this region stores and processes semantic information about objects, people, and places. Would this fit with what you know about your condition?
My tumour started in my left temporal lobe. It’s much bigger now and is in both hemispheres but most of my symptoms are still temporal-lobe related.
There is a dangerous dark side to the malleability of our memories. Fake news inspired by strong ideological beliefs can and does change perceptions of historical events. We know full well the effects of this from the propaganda campaigns of twentieth century tyrannical regimes. And contemporary politicians seemed to have learned these lessons well.
Good point! It's scary how easily our memories can be warped, isn't it? The same brain flexibility that helps us learn and adapt can make us surprisingly vulnerable to manipulation. And you make a really important connection to those old propaganda campaigns -- today's politicians seem to be working from the same playbook, just with fancier digital tools at their disposal. What we saw in the 20th century wasn't just a historical anomaly -- it's showing us exactly how fragile our shared understanding of reality can be.
I’m going to take up Matti’s point above, as well as amplify it in my own way. I have a conclusion that Matti might consider reasonable, though it’s pretty radical so he may not.
Consider Donald Trump’s perspective regarding himself. Apparently he believes he’s one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, and that he’s wrongly been persecuted by liberals given his righteous attempts to stop them from destroying America. I suspect that most here agree with me that this delusion nicely displays the tagline of Suzi’s post — “False memories are exactly what you need”. And for anyone who thinks Trump’s perspective on himself isn’t highly deluded, you might substitute a given liberal’s perspective who you actually do consider deluded in order to still assess the following argument.
Much of humanity is ruled by tyrannical governments that are encouraged to persecute some of their people in order to maintain their power. And even though the people of Syria, North Korea, Russia, and so on are forced to suffer in this way, there’s no real worry that such countries will overthrow liberal societies since we wouldn’t stand for it. Instead we hope to someday help free the oppressed. There’s another threat to liberal society that I don’t have an answer for however. This is the mind control that China has been instituting by means of its Social Credit System.
No one seems to talk about their SCS anymore. While there was a time when Chinese officials were quite loose lipped regarding their plan to create a system where all Chinese people would be scored positively to negatively given their already massive government surveillance, and thus citizens would be punished and rewarded in general on the basis of what their scores happened to be, today they deny that their still evolving SCS will ever be used that way. Given all its talk of “misinformation”, I consider it chilling that the current SCS Wikipedia article reads like it was directly written by Chinese officials!
Brutality and oppression is a tool that governments sometimes use to control their people, but history tells us that this also tends to make them rebellious rather than supportive. What if a government were instead to give its people incentives to do economically prosperous and healthy things, as well as penalties for the contrary, and also penalties for criticizing or fighting government rule? It seem to me that if done well such a country ought to become quite wealthy. Not only do I suspect that the Chinese will become extremely wealthy by means of building such a mind control state, but that humanity in general ought to succumb to thus terminate its brief experiment with liberty based governing.