Try to imagine yourself without memory. What would be left of your identity? Memory is far more than the sum of past events and knowledge – it is what makes us what we are. The human definition of self rests on this mix of collective and private experience.
Like any human ability, memory does not operate infallibly. Instead of a seamless record of our lives, each of us has a collection of fragments that grows more precious with the advancing years. We accumulate a fantastic body of knowledge, but we do not always have access to the parts we wish to remember.
As we get older, we may wonder if our memory is getting too full to cope. But science tells us that memory capacity is limitless. What we consciously recall is just a fraction of the vast storehouse that our memory comprises, built up from the moment we enter life. And we all have the ability, through technique and practice, to make better use of our natural capacity for remembering.
Memory And Identity
Memories of past experiences, both positive and negative, combine to give us a sense of who we are. Our perceptions of the events we have experienced and emotions we have felt are stored in the memory and help to shape how we see Ourselves as individuals. It is sometimes said that we are what we remember. As we go through life, we acquire layer after layer of memories that inform us who we are and help to determine what we will become. Every incident or emotion, whether stored consciously or unconsciously, has the power to create new attitudes and influence patterns of behaviour. Try to imagine having no memories at all – you would be quite lost and unable to understand even your thoughts. Now, try to imagine retaining your existing memories but being unable to make new ones – there would be no personality development and no possibility of emotional or intellectual growth. This was the case for a man known to researchers as ‘ NA ‘, whose brain was damaged in an accident in 1959. He woke every morning as the same cheerful individual who never changed his haircut and talked about dead film stars as if they were contemporaries.
Importance of first memories
The Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler believed that our first memories show our fundamental attitude to life. Adler, who originated the idea of the inferiority complex, claimed that his own earliest recollection was sitting as a sickly child watching the antics of his healthier brother. Fittingly, General Eisenhower’s earliest memory was of fighting off a goose, and Albert Einstein’s was of staring at a compass needle, trying to work out why it always pointed north. However, if memory shapes a personality, it is also true that as adults, we selectively remember things that reinforce our ideas of who and what we are. A champion footballer may recollect his first-ever goal as a piece of brilliance for which he was highly praised,” while an academic may recall the maths lesson when only she knew the answer to the teacher’s question.
The archivist and the mythmaker
John Kotre, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, sees auto biographical memory as the result of a struggle between an inner archivist and an inner mythmaker. The archive tries to construct an objective account of events while the mythmaker is busy turning us into the protagonists of our adventures. Usually, the mythmaker edits out our blunders and immortalises our victories, but it does not always turn us into heroes. The mythmaker can also make us obsessed with our failures and doom us to repeat them. But, for good or bad, it helps to make us unique. It exaggerates the differences in experience and perspective between ourselves and others and contributes to our identity.
Creating an alternative past
T his process of ‘self-making’ means that our sense of continuity as in dividuals may be no more than an illusion. We may never truly have been the children – or the younger selves of any age – that we remember. People who suffer a traumatic event will often create a whole alternative past in light of what has happened. For example, a happily married wife who discovers her husband’s affairs may sud de n l y see her entire marriage as a panorama of suspicion and deceptions. On a less extreme scale, this sort of thing is constantly happening to all of us. Researchers at Stanford University in the USA read a story to a group of people, followed by either a series of depressing homilies or a comic monologue. Later, those who heard the sermons remembered the sad parts of the story; those who heard the comic pieces recalled the happy parts. Despite the apparent continuity provided by memories and the personality’s strong urge to maintain itself, the world forces us to remake ourselves and our pasts every day.
