RECALL, RECOLLECTION, REFLECTION
Guest Writer: Ken Fellows
LIFE CYCLE
day lilly. fellows
It’s intriguing how memories get stored in our brains, available there on-call, or to arise spontaneously. A recent NYT obituary for psychologist Endel Tulving, 93, described how he elucidated our modern understanding of memories. In his 1972 book The Organization of Memory, he proposed that humans have two forms of memory: one is a “semantic form of knowing,” …storage of facts like “George Washington was our first President,” and skills such as “how to brush your teeth.” The second form he termed “episodic memory”…recall of places, events, and experiences–the “taste of a delicious croissant eaten on the Champs-Elysees.”
Tulving’s work also showed that the human brain records and retrieves the two types of information via separate brain tracts or pathways. This insight is substantiated by modern psychological studies and, recently, by PET imaging. He also thought of episodic memory as a human device for “moving forward”…a mechanism for transporting ourselves to a different time. Author Tim Obrien, in his book The Things They Carried, calls this “joining of the past to the future”:
“Forty-three years old, and the (Vietnam) War occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet my remembering makes it now.
“I should forget. But the remembering is that you don’t forget. You take your material where you find it, which is your life, at the intersection of the past and the present. The memory traffic feeds into a rotary loop up in your head, where it circles for a while, then imagination flows in pretty soon, and the traffic merges and shoots off a thousand different streets.”
Obrien’s thoughts illustrate why long-term recall can be fallible. Similarly, writer Geoff Dyer has observed: “Everything in my book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head.” These observations on remembering…that “imagination flows in and the traffic merges”… elucidate why our recollections may feel ‘true’ but are not necessarily ‘the truth.’
Aging can be a fierce impediment to accurate recall, something most come to endure, making us sympathetic to the older man’s complaint in Ward Just’s novel Forgetfulness:
“My memory isn’t what it was. The years wash into one another, a watercolor
memory. One fact bleeds into another. Emotions bleed. Forgetfulness is a dream state, and it’s an old man’s friend.”
Ken Fellows
Joanna joannseibert.com