A Stitch in Time

Memory is subjective.

It's easy to see in other people, when they seem to forget things or remember them differently than you do. When confronted with an individual with a different version of a shared piece of reality, most people have a reaction somewhere between irritation and rage. You may have experienced the kind of individual that seems to revise your personal shared history to their liking. The kind of incident where you're asked the equivalent of "Remember when you admitted what an idiot you were about...." First, you experience confusion because you don't know what they are talking about. Then you may react with indignant denial because you don't like the way it sounds and you can't imagine you would have ever behaved that way. Later, you may wonder if something like what you were told actually happened.

I recently heard a report about memory that seems to confirm some of this. We tend to "rework" memories in our heads, equivalent to the way you retell a story, inserting details that make you more honorable and intelligent and less petty or selfish. With enough mental retelling of the story, there tends to be an "adjustment" to a version more to your liking. People tend to try to forget their own stupidities and mistakes and amplify the slights of others into outrages. I think most people are guilty of this revisionist history, and it's very hard to catch yourself at it.

There is another type of memory that I've recently realized is unreliable. I'm currently listening to The Civil War, A Narrative by Shelby Foote for about the 4th or 5th time. I do it about every three years. It's such a dense and rich broth of information that I find myself dipping into it again and again. Each time I listen to it (you have to love audiobooks) I hear something new, or find that there is fresh enjoyment even in the parts I remember the broad outline of. There are many parts of the story that seem new and I wonder if I've forgotten or didn't pay attention to the narrative the other times I listened.

I find it interesting to listen when I know how the story is going to end. I do remember many of the events that occur along the way in detail. However, some parts I don't seem to remember at all and others have many of the key details blurry or missing. I seldom hear something that is the exact opposite from what I remember, so that gives me hope that I have the story correct, just incomplete in my memory.

I described this sensation of fresh discovery of familiar material to my wife. Groping for an appropriate metaphor, I said it was as if the information is a series of stitches, where you see the general track and some of the pieces, but the rest are hidden below the surface.

I like the imagery of the metaphor, because we are in fact following the thread of information, and it is in fact sporadic and sketchy in its details.

This is the way most memories are. I sometimes find myself comparing personal history with my brothers, and I find that their recollections sometimes include things that I cannot recall at all, while other times the details vary from what I remember. There are many things that we agree on perfectly, but I tend to think that these incidents are often the more iconic or outstanding events that we have discussed over and over since the original occurrence.

I don't believe that what I am describing is necessarily faulty memory, I think this is simply how memory works. You experience shared events differently because of the physical, intellectual, and emotional state you are in when they are going on. Some of this is perception bias, and some is distraction and inattention.

How often have you been listening to a person tell a story, and you realize that you lost the thread of the story right in the middle of the telling? Some times, when this happens to me, I realize that the cause is that something that was said made me think of a related or tangent subject that my mind immediately and automatically followed. Since true multitasking is virtually impossible, this is the point where you stop paying attention to the narrative, and follow your own internal one. The speaker might as well be saying "blah blah blah". Sometimes, I can snap myself out of distractions and "play back" the last few seconds and recover what was said. It's like I have a short term audible memory loop in my head. Try it sometime, maybe it's a natural part of the human mind. I can't be the only one that can do this.

It does make me wonder how we ever get through learning in a classroom situation. Really, a teacher has to be fresh and compelling all the time in order to prevent the naturally wandering attentions of a room full of students. It truly is like herding cats, all those minds skittering in all directions.

It's a wonder we get anything done. But it's also wonderful that these distractions may have some true value in them. In another context, we would call these mental wanderings inspiration.