The Persistence of Memory

As regular readers of this blog will know, I have very good recall of small moments from my past, and I often write my blog posts based on incidents that occurred many years ago. So, why is this the case for some people and not for others?

There are two areas of research which are important for trying to explain this process, developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. From a non expert point of view the main drivers appear to be the rate of brain maturation, whether you are brought up in a household that introduces you to elaborative reminiscing, awareness of self in your early years, and the rate of language development. Let’s take those one at a time.

When your brain is developing in early infancy it is creating new neural pathways at a rapid rate. Some of these pathways develop alongside existing pathways and some overwrite them. If your brain develops in the first manner then your early childhood memories will tend to stay more intact, whereas if it develops in the second manner it will jettison those early memories in favour of newer ones. This may go some way to explaining the differences between siblings from the same family whose early memories are either largely intact or lost in the mists of time.

Elaborative reminiscing is the process by which multi-sensory approaches are taken to memory development and recall. Often this will be driven by those around you. If you are asked for a purely factual description of something from early on you will tend to lose those early memories. For example, if you are asked what happened on a particular occasion and you say ‘I went to the fair’ and it’s left at that, you are unlikely to recollect the fair itself in any detail later. If, on the other hand, you are asked about the sounds, the lights, the smells and the sensations you experienced you are much more likely to develop strong memories that persist. Once you adopt this approach for yourself you are significantly more likely to develop a cache of strong memories.

Some people develop a very early sense of self. The mechanisms of this development are complex, but from a lay person’s perspective I think it might help if, like me, you were an only child. If you have siblings it’s possible that your early memories may be clouded by the sense that you are part of a collective rather than an individual entity. For me, I was very much on my own both within the family and outside of it so my sense of self is likely to have developed more quickly if this particular theory is accepted. I was never particularly happy in either setting so a lot of my earlier memories are perhaps sharper and more melancholy than other people’s.

In order to develop strong core memories in the early years you need the language to be able to express them. I was brought up to be able to talk to adults without embarrassing my parents too much and so my language development was rapid. As a result I was able to reflect on early memories perhaps more completely than others. Of course, my precocious language development also meant that I became something of an outcast amongst children of my own age because I expressed myself in ways that seemed weird to others.

Now, it’s very important to acknowledge the fact that memory creation is an ongoing process. It can be affected by listening to other people who experienced the same event or by seeing a picture of that event. My memories, clear though they are, are not video recordings of events. They are layers built up over time whereby the original memories may get subtly or substantially altered in your brain. This is why it’s important to acknowledge that recollections can differ even if you experience an event with just one other person. If you experience an event within a group setting of, let’s say, 20 people, you will have 20 different recollections of the event, some of which differ so substantially that they may as well be different events. It’s also possible that only you remember the event years later because it had an importance in your life that it didn’t have in other people’s.

Memories are vital in helping someone to make sense of their life, but they are also malleable and prone to distortion, either minor or major. As long as you remember that, you can take comfort from or lessons from those memories as you continue to shape the person you are from within.