Everything that happens to you as a context – not just circumstances and surroundings but also your internal state, emotions, and physical feelings as you experience it. If the event is laid down as a memory, some of that context is laid down with it and becomes a hook for remembering.
Imagine you are happily enjoying the sights on holiday when you become aware of a disturbance close by – a man shouting as his camera is snatched from his shoulder. If you were asked to describe what happened, you might begin with your first sighting of the man as he jumped to his feet and perhaps end with a fleeting glimpse of the thief pushing rapidly through the crowds. But no matter how thorough your description of the event might be, your full memory would contain much richer contextual detail.
Senses and emotions
There are two types of contextual information attached to memories of events. The first is the sensory background. You would have a conscious recollection of the sights and sounds that drew your attention to the camera snatch. Unconsciously, however, you might have taken in the smell of a hamburger being eaten close by or the background scent of banks of jasmine. And all the time, you would have been registering other visual and auditory information – the splash and sparkle of the fountain, a child feeding crumbs to the birds, a clock chiming the half-hour. Although peripheral to the main event, these sensations are part of the experience and become part of the memory.
The other type of context is your internal state. If you were feeling happy, these internal feelings would be integrated into the memory along with the peripheral sensations. If you felt uneasy after the theft, your memory will corporate that shift in mood.
Re-establishing the setting
Contextual elements can be valuable aids to recall because when one part of a memory is retrieved, it often hooks out all the rest. Police make use of this principle in reconstructions of crimes – restaging an event in its original location, using look like victims can help passers-by to recall important details that might have been otherwise forgotten.
Researchers have found that it is easier to recall something learned in a particular setting if you return to the same setting. In one extraordinary experiment, deep-sea divers were asked to learn lists of words underwater, while another group learned their lists on the beach. When asked to recall the words, the groups were much more successful when they were tested in the setting in which they learned the words.
This important finding of memory and environmental context can be usefully applied in everyday life. Students have been shown to perform better in exams if they sit in the classroom where they learned the subject. Similarly, when you are engaged in a frantic search for your keys, it may be infuriating to be asked to think about where you last had them, but recalling the context of when you last used them can be enough to prompt the memory of what you did with them.
Inexplicable feelings
The downside of contextual memory is its power to influence present thoughts. When your mood is low, it can act as a trigger to gloomy recollections, which feed into and deepen your state of unhappiness. This spiral of sad memories is often a feature of depression. By the same token, people in a happy frame of mind are more likely to dwell on pleasant memories.
Contextual links can also prompt idiosyncratic responses. As we get older, we accumulate more and more unconscious links, which is one reason why our reactions to sensations may become increasingly individual. Many of our otherwise inexplicable likes and dislikes may be accounted for by buried context-dependent memories.
Uncovering Feelings Of Sadness
Joseph recalls how the smell of rabbits triggered a long-forgotten memory of a sad time in his life: ‘When I was three, I went to stay with my cousins. I can’t remember the house, or the garden, or anything much. I only know about it because my mother mentioned it a few times. ‘Then, quite recently, I was passing a pet store, and there was a white rabbit in a cabinet just outside the door. As I passed, I caught a whiff of hay mingled with the smell of rabbit droppings. Suddenly, I had an intensely clear memory of helping my cousins to clean out their rabbits. The strange thing was that, at the same time, I felt overwhelmingly sad.
‘ When I got home, I called my mother and told her what I had experienced. She confirmed that my cousins did have a rabbit. And she was not surprised that I remembered feeling sad. I had been sent away to my cousins immediately after my father died because my mother was so upset. Until then, I had no memory of my feelings about losing my Dad. I can barely remember him and have always told people that I can’t remember anything about his death. It took a rabbit – of all things – to bring it back .’
