Memory-anchors
In this episode, we explore how human memory works, and how specific types of items can help in this
First, my apologies that this episode is late again: some old health-issues have resurfaced, which certainly isn’t helping. And as I mentioned in the last episode, the house I’ve been renting for the last few years is being sold by the landlord, so my life is in turmoil at the moment - a maelstrom of packing, and an urgent and so far fruitless search for somewhere else to live. Oh well.
Anyway, one side-effect is that all the packing is turning up all kinds of things that, in too many cases, I’d long forgotten about, but each trigger a flood of old memories when I come across them again.
For example, one of these memory-anchors actually sits on my bedside-table, gathering dust at present, but has been with me on so many of my travels:
If it looks a bit battered, that should be no surprise, because it’s been with me now for close to seventy years. My parents bought it for me - and similar ones for my siblings - on their first-ever trip overseas, to a conference in Paris in the late 1950s. The purple sash was supposed to indicate that it represented a mayor; one of my brothers had one that depicted a gendarme, but I can’t remember the others. It’s an anchor for a lot of different memories: it sat in my pocket on that long motorcycle-ride across the US and back in the late 1980s, for example, and in my backpack to all those conferences I presented at in the late 2000s and early 2010s, in Sweden, New Zealand, Brazil and so many other countries, including, of course, its own homeland of France.
Up on the lintel above the old fireplace is another memory-anchor, important to me for a rather different reason:
It’s made of cardboard, about 12 inches (30cm) high, with an angled stand folded behind it. I used it as a prop at book-signing events for my first book, way back in 1976. It’s an extract from a woodcut in Georgius Agricola’s sixteenth-century technical treatise on mining, De Re Metallica; we used that woodcut on the cover of my book, as you may recognise from the photo in the post ‘Sense and sensemaking’ a few episodes ago here. I do remember that I made the prop myself, though I don’t remember how. A lot of memories associated with that one, as you can imagine - and a lot of probably-justifiable pride, too, given my (lack of) age at the the time.
And then, over on the other side of that rather dark room, there’s this memory-anchor:
It’s my maternal grandfather’s microscope, from when he was a medical student back in the early 1910s. I can’t use it as an anchor for my own memories about him, because he’d died when I was only about two years old, so I never really met him in any way that I could remember. I can use it as an anchor for what I do know about him - for example, that he was a ship’s doctor in the First World War, that he somehow survived his ship being sunk in the Arctic, though with shrapnel embedded in his back for the remainder of his life; and then he rejoined the Navy as a senior ship’s doctor for the duration of the Second World War as well. To me, though, it’s more important as a symbol of my own professional focus, on the importance of the small details - and the small changes, too.
(Back in my teens I used to have a telescope too, which I suppose should symbolise a matching emphasis on the big-picture. I lost the telescope itself many years ago, in one of too many house-moves, but the focus on the big-picture still remains, as you’ll know.)
Yet how do these things act as memory-anchors? How does this work?
In essence, it all comes down to how human memory operates, and what we need to do to support it in the longer-term.
As everyone knows all too well, there’s a significant difference between short-term memory and longer-term. There’s an analogy there with RAM versus hard-drive in a computer, in that short-term memory (the equivalent of the computer’s RAM, maintained only whilst the computer’s power is on), vanishes quite quickly unless it’s somehow worth storing into long-term memory (the equivalent of the computer’s rewritable but relatively-stable hard-drive). But that’s about as far as that analogy with computer-memory will go: human memory is not electronic but biological and biochemical, the network-mechanism is completely different to that in computers, and I haven’t yet heard of anyone who can fully describe how it actually works, from capture to storage to retrieval, from sensing to perception to sensemaking to biochemistry and back again. The one certain point there is that it’s not like in any computer, whether electronic or mechanical. Yeah, still as weird as ever.
What we do know is that memory is associative. As each new memory is formed, through sensing and sensemaking, it’s stored in an associative way: this connects with that, which connects with that, which then connects with that and this too, and so on. In essence again, it’s held together as a complex web of connections with sort-of pathways that sort-of weave through the mesh to provide a sort-of-certain-if-often-somewhat-malleable effect that’s just-about reliable enough to describe as ‘memory’.
Having captured a memory, how do we retrieve it? Again, it seems to be associative, though to my knowledge the exact mechanisms still aren’t fully known. Perhaps the closest analogy would be somewhat like how pollen works with plants: out at the surface of memory, there are the metaphoric equivalents of a vast array of flower-stamens, each awaiting its real-world equivalent of pollen to trigger it into action and bring the respective memory back into our awareness. It’s not as precise as pollen’s one-to-one match, though: for some people, some traumatic memories can be triggered by almost anything, whilst for most of us, memories can be triggered in multiple ways. And over time, the metaphoric receptacles can decay, making it increasingly difficult to re-trigger an old memory at all.
Which is where memory-anchors re-enter this story, because these are the things that can re-awaken even the most faded of memories.
There are many kinds of things that can act as anchors and triggers for memory. These days, perhaps the most common ones are visual, in the form of photographs and the like. For example, a decade ago, as my mother’s memories started to fragment and fail, we set up a digital picture-frame for her, with a couple of hundred of photos from throughout her previous ninety years. The displayed photo would change every hour, and would often re-trigger an old story, sometimes with new detail we hadn’t heard before - though some of that detail would turn out to be largely fictitious, of course, given the general fraying of memory that occurs with increasing age.
Yet memory-anchors can also take on many other forms, connecting through others of the senses. A place, a tree, a favourite spot: that’ll do it for many of us. On the other side, my mother hated seeing searchlights in the sky, or hearing the sirens of emergency-vehicles on either of the main-roads a hundred yards or so from her house: those would immediately remind her of her time as a still-teenaged medical-student in London in the early 1940s, reliving the first-hand horrors of the Blitz.
For me - though fortunately with a quieter history than hers - it’s more often touch, or something tangible, that brings up old memories: the texture of that toy-bear’s fur, for example, or the heft of that microscope in my hand. Taste too, of course: for me, that oddly sweet-bland-sour taste of a mulberry will bring back memories of the hundred-year-old mulberry-tree in the garden at my childhood home, and thence trigger off all manner of images and experiences from that garden itself.
And for almost everyone, the most powerful memory-anchor will be some kind of scent. I can guess, for example, that the smell of wax-crayons will immediately bring back some of your memories from primary-school, where you used those crayons to draw those scrawly pictures that went up on the schoolroom wall, where those now tiny-seeming desks were just the right size for you, and were where your first firm friendships were made, and in some cases may still continue to this day.
(Oh, and in addition to all of those natural cues as memory-anchors, we can also create our own artificial ones, through millennia-old techniques such as the memory-palace, the Method of loci, and the ‘art of memory’ used in the theatres of Shakespeare’s time to help actors remember their lines and moves. True, it does take a lot of practice and discipline to make it work reliably and well - but it can be well worth the effort. May be useful to explore in more depth, anyway?)
In short, our memory-anchors matter: they are, in an almost literal sense, the keys to our history, our memories. For each of us, we need to be aware of what our anchors are, and how to maintain and refresh them - because losing them could cause us to lose access to a whole lot of our memories as well.