BANKING ON MEMORY
I spent the last two days trying to recall a word I don’t use often but had encountered several times recently, a not uncommon word, one syllable, easy enough, but still it eludes me. I can picture the thing itself but still the word does not come forward. I realize that this kind of blocked recall happens more often now that I am into a late life decade.
Lentils. Was the word.
Freud declared that he could not psychoanalyze anyone over fifty. The memory banks would be so full that unravelling the vast unconscious storage would be just interminable.
Memory banks do fill up but the brain creates levels of storage like the book stacks of a library, shuttling some memories down so far that they remain unretrievable until something—a word, a sighting, a person’s face, a scent, a taste, a sound—suddenly evokes a long hidden or obscured or seemingly lost memory.
The long decades of life provide multitudes of memories that get banked by the brain’s autonomous storage system, selective in creating possibilities of instant recall, accessible memories that can be retrieved readily, memories that lay dormant but can surface spontaneously or by directed effort, and memories that lie like creatures of the ocean’s deep, scuttling in the darkest part our unconscious.
Memories also function as an interpersonal collective: a partner of long standing may trigger the seemingly lost recall of a shared episode. People from one’s past also provide keys to opening a memory stash. Meeting an old classmate at a reunion can bring forward a shower of memories ascribed to that period. Photographs can elicit forgotten (or neuronally downward displaced) memories. And recalled memories can bestir a cascade of memories somehow tagged as related. Thus memories can seem embedded within other memories and when one is recalled the rest may, in suit, pour forth.
Memories are laid down and variously sifted through parts of the brain, burnished by intensity, emotionality, vibrance, and exigence.
Memories are also cocooned within layers of emotion. And emotions can themselves trigger memories. The iconic version of that effect is the recapitulation of a memory that arises unbound by the frame that fixes it to the past. Such memories, typical of PTSD, appear not as memories but as current real time experiences. Deju vu is the experience of an event coupled to a similar past event with time compressed and sandwiched between present and past.
The crumbling of recall capacity that occurs with aging can be dismaying and even embarrassing as one stumbles to find a word mid-sentence while the brain falters and fails to summon the name or word that tauntingly waggles on the tip of one’s tongue.
I walk from the kitchen to my office that, moments before, began with the intent to fetch a battery. Arriving at my office I found myself staring around wondering what was the purpose of coming here. That little battery fetch plan had virtually slipped my mind, fell out of my immediate memory, subject to distraction, maybe shoved aside by the brief time it took to make that tiny journey. Plans rely on memory as future projections of a plan to be held for later release. And plans are subject to the same indeterminate whims of the memory machine. Plans themselves become memories, subject to displacement and forgetting.
Much of the function of memory is directed and variously gated by a small brain organ, the hippocampus, operating in relation to the forebrain, where planning is focused, and the thalamus, a kind of distributor, and the amygdala, the brain’s engine of fear and anger. Memories are laid down and variously sifted through these parts of the brain, burnished by intensity, emotionality, vibrance, and exigence.
So, what is the mechanism of recall? How do we retrieve memories either by intention of by accident? Recall is a kind of search, an intentional feat of thought attempting to retrieve something—a word, a name, a formed memory—from the known but, really unknown, recesses of our mind.
Where mind is, there wherein lie memories, is still a much conjectured topic We all assume we have a fully stocked storehouse of memories much like we depend on acts of language, relying on vocabulary and syntax and semantics and grammar to produce speech and writing and to comprehend language brought to us from outside.
Memory is perhaps the lead function of mind. Without memory, as Alzheimer disease teaches and terrorizes us, the mind is an empty vessel. In full and final effect, memory is what constitutes and comprises life and, therefore, the life of the mind.
